Woman Swamped With Thousands Of Calls After Her Number Is Mistaken For Helpline

A woman in Ireland said she received over 4,000 missed calls after people mixed up her number with that of a helpline.

Helen McMohan was said to have been flooded with calls after her phone number was mistaken for the helpline of the country's Ministry of Economy, News 7 trends reported. The woman said she received calls from many people, including older individuals who sounded "very distressed" after receiving a mail from the department asking them to spend the rest of their prepaid cards before a deadline.

The Spend Local scheme mistakenly advertised her business number in place of the helpline number. McMohan, who is from Bangor, Northern Ireland, said the number which was advertised was wrong by a single digit, and therefore the calls were navigated to the first aid training firm owned by her.

"At the start of the Spend Local scheme I was getting a lot of phone calls because there is one digit difference between my business landline number and theirs," McMohan said while speaking to BBC’s Good Morning Ulster. "Then that sort of died away and I was getting one or two calls a day and then from Thursday evening my phone went mad and all these voicemails were being left."

"I thought all these people were looking for first aid training coming up to Christmas. I was listening to them and one woman, in particular, sounded lovely and I rang her back and explained she had misdialled and she read out the email and forwarded it to me and I realized, oh my goodness and that was the start of it," McMohan added.

McMohan said that she listened to the callers and tried to get back to as many as possible to tell them that the number was wrong. The department eventually formally apologized to her for the blunder, The Irish News reported.

"The Department would again like to apologize to Ms. McMahon and officials will be in contact with her formally," a spokeswoman for the Division for the Economic system was cited as saying by the outlet. "Division officers had spoken to her on Friday and once more at this time to apologize after her enterprise phone quantity was mistakenly utilized in correspondence concerning the Spend Native card," she said.

The Spend Local card was initiated by the Northern Ireland government in an effort to financially empower people after the COVID-19 pandemic. The department of economy hands each individual a Spend Local £100 ($133.88) Prepaid Mastercard to spend in local businesses over a short period of time.