A B.C. couple is begging people to stop calling them.
For over a year, Natasha Lavoie and Jonathan McCurrach have been fielding dozens upon dozens of calls from strangers claiming they’ve found the couple’s cat, Torbo.
But they don’t have a cat named Torbo.
And their cat, Mauser, isn’t missing.
“Sometimes, like six times a day, I’m getting these really random phone calls and people leaving me voicemails saying that they found my cat and they want money for my cat,” Lavoie told CBC’s On The Coast host Gloria Macarenko. “I’m like, ‘My cat’s at home in the air conditioning.'”
After many months of trying to figure out why this was happening, McCurrach asked a caller how they got their number. The caller explained the number was listed on a shirt styled to look like a missing cat poster.
“Why would you use a real number?” McCurrach asked.
CBC News reached out to the company in question — Wisdumb NY — which said the shirt is no longer online. However, on the company’s Instagram page, there are photos of missing cat posters with 604 area code numbers attached.
“The use of a real number within the art created was not intentional,” a customer service representative said in an email to CBC News.
Some phone numbers have been set aside in North America for fictional use, all starting with the number 555. As Terry O’Reilly explained in a 2021 episode of Under the Influence, the use of 555 started when TV shows and films started using phone numbers more frequently in their plot lines, and attached to those numbers complaints about prank phone calls. Phone companies reserved 555-0100 through to 555-0199 for fictional use.
But, like Wisdumb, not everyone uses those 555 numbers; as reported by The Guardian, Netflix was forced to edit a phone number in the series Squid Game after a South Korean woman was deluged with calls in 2021. In 2009, the same thing happened when rapper Soulja Boy featured a U.K. family’s phone number in a song.
Lavoie said she’s hesitant to change her number because it’s a 604 area code — which was B.C.’s first area code and nowadays, is hard to get. In May, the province got its sixth area code, 257.
“I’ve had my number for 20 years,” she said. “I don’t want to change it. I’ll just keep not answering.”
Over the last year, Surrey’s Natasha Lavoie has been receiving dozens of calls about people finding her lost cat Torbo. But Lavoie’s cat is actually named Mauser, and isn’t missing. Lavoie and her partner Jonathan McCurrach investigated and found out that an American fashion brand called Wisdumb had listed her number on a T-shirt depicting a lost cat, without her permission. The couple says the label hasn’t been co-operative after they reached out.
Some of the calls have been disturbing. In one voicemail they received, a caller claimed they had a snake that “eats free kittens.”
“When we started actually picking up the calls or responding to the voicemails, I thought it was some attempt at a scam. You hear about scams all the time about missing pets,” McCurrach said.
He said the calls are coming primarily from the United States, but they have received a couple from Canada.
“Half the time, they just cut you off and go like, ‘No, I’ve got your cat. I want the money for the cat.’ And I’m like, ‘No, there’s no money, there’s no cat.’ And they usually hang up.”
Lavoie and McCurrach did reach out to the company, which gave them an answer similar to what CBC News received. But McCurrach said he wishes they’d offered a “real apology.”
“I feel like I deserve a T-shirt after this,” Lavoie added. “I think we both do.”