Imagine picking up your phone expecting to hear from a friend, only to find a confused stranger asking about their T-Mobile bill. That’s exactly what happened to one T-Mobile customer whose personal phone number was accidentally displayed as the carrier’s support line on Google search results.

The unusual situation started when a Reddit user’s father-in-law began receiving non-stop calls from people who thought they were contacting T-Mobile customer service. At first, he ignored them thinking they were spam, but the calls kept coming. When he finally answered, callers insisted they had found his number by searching “T-Mobile support” on Google.

According to The Mobile Report, the problem started with an innocent mistake on T-Mobile’s official community forums. The man’s wife had created an account to share her experience at a local T-Mobile store, but she accidentally used her husband’s phone number as her username instead of a typical handle. Google’s automated systems then picked up that phone number during routine web crawling and incorrectly identified it as T-Mobile’s customer support line. When people searched for help, Google sometimes displayed a call button with the wrong number.

The mishap highlights how automated web systems can sometimes produce unexpected results. Forum usernames are typically indexed by search engines, but they’re not usually phone numbers. In this case, the combination of an unusual username choice and Google’s algorithm trying to be helpful created a perfect storm that turned someone’s personal line into an accidental call center.

While the situation was likely resolved quickly once the forum username was changed, it serves as a reminder to be careful about what personal information you use online, even in places you might not expect it to cause problems. It’s also a good example of why you should always double-check that you’re calling official support numbers directly from a company’s website rather than relying solely on search results.

Source: The Mobile Report