This does not make you look good in the slightest.
It wasn’t meant to.
At one time 10-15 years ago my mobile number was one digit off from the number of a local “pain clinic” AKA opioid pill mill.
I received a LOT of calls from strung out abusers. This being the Midwest, some were very nice, others just disconsolate. Never had a jerk. All were desperate for more pills pronto, despite it being after normal medical office hours. Took me awhile to figure out what was going on.
I called the doctor’s “clinic”. The voicemail that answered said roughly:
Hi. You’ve reached the office of Dr. Bob PillPusher in Smallville. Our phone number is area code 123 456-78mumble9. OUr hours are 9-5 Monday to Friday. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back.
Guess which digit he mumbled? Yup. The one that turns his number into mine. I tried a lot to contact him and get him/them to re-record their voicemail. Never succeeded.
I think he got busted because the phone calls stopped rather abruptly a year or two later.
Mmm hmm.
Phone numbers always get confused from time to time.
When I bought my current house, there was no working phone. The previous owners had been running a business out of the place, and wanted to keep the numbers. (But they still held the contract on the service - which required me getting in contact with them to give the telco permission to use the lines into my house - which seemed very odd.)
So I was allocated a new number. Which turned out to be the number of a defunct business that bought and sold old vinyl records and associated equipment. I got a lot of calls from disappointed people wanting to unload their old record collections or buy bits for their turntable. I eventually tracked down the owner of the old business - and he replied that there were a lot of his old business cards out there. Not much he could do, he was getting too old to keep the business going and that was it. A least I got to be able to tell the callers what had happened. They stopped after about five years. I no longer have a landline.
A common scammer call trick is to spoof the number with a number very close to yours. (Or even your own number.) This seems to be on the basis that the recognition factor in the number might trigger you to answer. I once got a call from a very suspicious young woman who wanted to know why I had called her. Only after the call did I realise that her number was one digit away from mine. A scammer had spoofed the number to be very close to hers, and got mine.
[Moderating]
Cool it, all three of you. If you’re going to make this personal, take it to the Pit.
My bet is with this. Not a scam. Just wrong/fake info put in on an application of some sort. This happened to me a few months back with car dealerships in the California area. All real dealerships. Texts and voice messages to not my name about a particular car. I did call one back and they apologized, saying someone must have put in the wrong info. Didn’t try to sell me anything. I also get the occasional text still for a guy named “Meryl” who many years ago apparently left my number in an application of some sort. If I do a search for my phone number in Spokeo, his name does show up alongside mine. (And, yes, I check my credit report every year, and nothing funny is coming of it because of that oddness.)
Sounds like a possible premise for a future season of Beef
Hehehe, my favorite is when they respond to my greeting with “Who is this?”
“Umm, no, that’s not how it works, dumbass. You called me. Who are you?”
There is of course an XKCD for the mistaken email address issue:
[Moderating]
Let me make this perfectly clear: Everyone drop this, everywhere except (if you must) the Pit.
My problem is that when I call someone or someplace I usually have some expectation of who is going to answer how. And instead I get a mad rush of 23 syllables delivered in 4 seconds delivered by an unfamiliar voice in an unexpected accent.
OK, So who are you and what did you just say again, but this time delivered at a volume and pace I can understand?
That way I can decide if you are indeed who / what I was trying to call. I’m the only person who can make that determination; you the recipient really don’t have enough info to decide that. Me providing my name to you is useless to you as the answerer since if it’s the right number you’ve never heard of me and if it’s the wrong number you’ve also never heard of me.
I totally get how my asking who or what organization you are can sound like a challenge, or an invasion of your privacy. But it’s not (necessarily) as nutty or selfish as it may sound.
No, it’s still nutty and selfish. You know who you called. They don’t know who you are. You call, you say who you are.
Yeah, most people lead with “Is this so-and-so?” when they hear an odd voice pick up on the other end. If you call and ask who you are speaking to without identifying yourself or at least who you meant to call, it’s normally going to be a really short call. It’s still probably the second most common response I’ve gotten from people mis-dialing my number. People apologizing is the most common response after realizing I’m not the intended receiver.
Heck, if you do so much as mispronounce my last name (it’s honestly not spelled how it sounds), it’s probably going to be a very short call. It’s obvious you don’t know me and are reading it off a sheet of paper. I probably didn’t want to talk to you in the first place.
85% of the calls to our “land line” (which nowadays is an internet signal patched into the old house wiring, no more copper wire phone lines in this area) are spam calls.
We let most of them go to voicemail and call back the folks who are real people, but now and then I pick up just for the heck of it. (Oddly, it seems like 35% of the time when I do it’s a real person, it’s as if they sound different and I recognize that!)
So far my best spammer reaction was to start before they did:
“Good afternoon and I hope you’re having a spectacular week. I want to ask you a few questions about soft drinks, or soda pop. But before I begin, I want to ask: have you seen any ads on the web or on billboards in your local area advertising any brand of carbonated beverage?”
[Back in the late '90s I had to work as a telephone researcher, so I was basically repeating my spiel from those days]
“I…uh… ma’am… no ma’am…”
“OK, so starting last Monday from the time you woke up, how many times would you say you consumed a soft drink or soda pop?”
“I…I’m sorry… ma’am I think you have the wrong number” click
Lol! Excellent!
People from the UK get our name right most of the time. Foreigners, not so much.
Heheheeh, I had that job at one time. I was terrible at it, but my favorite campaign was the survey for salty snacks in southern states. Naturally, it was called “Cracker Tracker”. 
kinda related - infuriating is when any entity like a bank or even tech support refuses to email out and they will only accept emails in - and then refuse to spell out the name with phonetic letters (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.). It’s like their 1st day ever on the phone & on the internet, and don’t know that muffling 1 letter will lead to repeated saying it, but the same way and not for nothing, most service techs don’t speak English natively and only with thick accents. Add to that subcontracting & farming out some services to other entities. So something like ‘yevgeny.mikhailovichinov@fifth.third.bank.com’ [I don’t have an account there, but my bank’s customer service contracts with their CS dept., for example], with crackling on the line, noisy boiler-room operation - and they refuse to spell out the letters. Of course arrogant types will think ‘old man yells at cloud’ but when I give my email address out, it’s always spelling it out, and always the phonetic word not ‘Bee Ay En Jay Oh’, but Bravo, Alpha, etc…
In short, customer service sucks & that’s even avoiding Facebook altogether whose customer service is non-existent. [separate problem]