A BC couple asks people to stop calling them.
For more than a year, Natasha Lavoie and Jonathan McCurrach have been presenting dozens in dozens of calls from strangers who claim that they have found the couple’s cat, tors.
But they do not have a cat called torso.
And his cat, Mauser, is not missing.
“Sometimes, like six times a day, I receive these really random phone calls and people who leave me voice messages saying that they found my cat and want money for my cat,” Lavoie told CBC’s On the coast Host Gloria Macarenko. “I’m like, ‘My cat is at home in the air conditioning.'”
After many months of trying to discover why this was happening, McCurrach asked a person who called how they obtained their number. The person called explained that the number was in a shirt designed to look like a lost cat poster.
“Why would you use a real number?” McCurrach asked.
CBC News contacted the company in question, Wisdumb NY, who said the shirt is no longer online. However, on the company’s Instagram page, there are photos of missing CAT posters with 604 attached area code numbers.
“The use of a real number within the created art was not intentional,” said a customer service representative in an email to CBC News.
Some telephone numbers have been reserved in North America for fictional use, all starting with number 555. As Terry O’Reilly explained in a 2021 episode of Under influenceThe use of 555 began when television programs and movies began using telephone numbers more frequently in their plot lines, and were attached to those numbers complaints about joke phone calls. Telephone companies reserved 555-0100 to 555-0199 for fictional use.
But, like Wisdumb, not everyone uses those 555 numbers; as reported by The guardianNetflix was forced to edit a telephone number in the series Squid game After a South Korean woman was flooded with calls in 2021. In 2009, the same happened when rapper Soulja Boy presented the telephone number of a United Kingdom family in a song.
Lavoie said that he doubts his number because it is an area code 604, which was the first BC area code and today, it is difficult to achieve. In May, the province obtained its sixth area code, 257.
“I’ve had my number for 20 years,” he said. “I don’t want to change it. I will simply continue to respond.”
During the last year, Natasha Lavoie de Surrey has been receiving dozens of calls about the people who find her lost toro. But Lavoie’s cat is actually called Mauser, and is not missing. Lavoie and his partner Jonathan McCurrach investigated and discovered that an American fashion brand called Wisdumb had listed their number in a shirt that represents a lost cat, without their permission. The couple says that the label has not been cooperative after they spread.
Some of the calls have been disturbing. In a voice email they received, a person he called said he had a snake that “eats triggers for free.”
“When we started collecting calls or responding to voicemists, I thought it was an attempt at a scam. You listen to scams all the time about lost pets,” McCurrach said.
He said that calls will arrive mainly from the United States, but have received a couple from Canada.
“Half of the time, they simply cut you and they are, ‘no, I have your cat. I want the money for the cat.’ And I say: ‘No, there is no money, there is no cat.’ And they usually hang.”
Lavoie and McCurrach communicated with the company, which gave them a similar response to what CBC News received. But McCurrach said he would like to have offered a “real apology.”
“I feel that I deserve a shirt after this,” Lavoie added. “I think we both do it.”
