You Just Reveived

2026-03-054:3722276dylan.gr

Disclaimer: These are my personal views and do not represent any organization or professional advice.#miscTue, 03 Mar 2026 08:52:08 +0200This post is dedicated to the nameless Vodafone employee…

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Disclaimer: These are my personal views and do not represent any organization or professional advice.

#misc

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:52:08 +0200

This post is dedicated to the nameless Vodafone employee watching over me and my family and blessing us with an abundance of free minutes.

My family and I share a single mobile phone. To be more precise, we share two sim cards which move between a nearly 10 year old Samsung smartphone and a dumb flip phone depending on the present circumstances.

The other day we received an SMS from Vodafone. Being a prepaid plan, the phone is showered with offers, promotions and gifts enticing the load of more credit. The longer the interval between top-ups the more messages the phone receives. I thought this message was one of those but I was wrong. This message was special.

Vodafone SMS — YOU JUST REVEIVED FREE UNLIMITED DATA AND 999999 MINUTES TO ALL FOR 5 DAYS! ENJOY BROWSING WITHOUT LIMITS WITH AN OFFER EXCLUSIVELY FOR YOU! -Vodafone

Usually, the offers we receive from Vodafone are conditional and require money be spent for them to activate ("SUPER OFFER! 50GB for 30 DAYS WITH 12,70€"). Sure, after a top-up they throw some free things at you but this message was different. An unprompted and unconditional gift of a million minutes and according to Vodafone —typo and all— just for me!

Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

At first I thought this message was sent in error but that didn't make sense. If the messages were entirely automated the likelihood of the typo appearing should be zero. I've been receiving messages from Vodafone for years and this is the first time I have seen a typo.

I thought the number was possibly an untransformed placeholder of some kind but I actually received the minutes. Surely if these things are automated there would be a safeguard in place to prevent such large values?

Could this merely be the hallucinations of a LLM? I don't think so. I doubt the system sending these messages to me for nearly a decade has been replaced with a large language model. I don't know why but this seems unlikely.

My mind then went the only place it possibly could: Is there a human being in a room somewhere far far away sending me ALL CAPS gifts and offers? Are the messages manually typed out? Did someone make a mistake and accidentally give me a million minutes?

Was this offer really exclusive or are there others out there who also received it? How many accounts does each person manage at once? Do they keep the same accounts they are assigned or is my account moved between handlers?

If it is an automated system, what circumstances could cause this message to occur? Why did I receive it and not someone else? Is the typo baked into some template somewhere?

It's all so strange and I doubt I'll find answers but that's OK. For five days I had a million minutes and I was possibly the first and only Vodafone minute millionaire.

—Dylan Araps

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Comments

By firefoxd 2026-03-057:424 reply

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development.

I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while testing.

By ajxs 2026-03-058:115 reply

When I worked for an Australian telco (not Vodafone), some developers on another team had used a very conspicuous mobile phone number in their integration tests, which actually connected to a real SMS service somewhere else in the company. No idea why they would do this. It turned out that this number belonged to a real person, who got absolutely buried in test SMS messages, when the integration tests ran as part of a CI/CD pipeline. The owner raised a complaint to the ombudsman, which led to all kinds of trouble for the developers.

In case anyone else here is curious, the ACMA maintains a list of reserved numbers for use in creative works, which you can use for dummy data: https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and...

By id00 2026-03-0510:132 reply

I worked for an Australian insurance company and we physically DDOSed a poor man's real mailbox with printed policy documents as we used their address during e2e testing and we mistakenly didn't put a testing flag somewhere.

Our CTO had to personally apologise to him

By lproven 2026-03-0612:01

I lost a Nationwide Building Society account I've had for forty years last year because the bank bought some extremely poor online-ID-verification system.

The bank forgot it had customers in a Crown Dependency. It forgot those countries issues their own ID, their own passports, their own drivers' licences. It forgot it closed its branches in those countries: it told me I had to go into my branch. My nearest branch is a £200 airfare away. It was not paying, naturally.

The crappy online-verification tool only recognises UK documents. It can't handle Isle of Man ones. They did not think.

By aetherspawn 2026-03-0512:311 reply

This sounds hilarious, how many physical items are we talking? Like his whole front porch full up of contract boxes?

By id00 2026-03-0513:24

The documents pack is like an A4 folder 1cm thick. He received close to 100 in one day. Enough for his mailbox to get full and for the postie to dump most of it on the lawn

By red_admiral 2026-03-0514:551 reply

In the 1970s, a German rock group had a one-hit wonder with a protest song against Munich's sex trade licensing (Skandal im Sperrbezirk). In the lyrics, they had a made-up (so they thought) phone number 32-16-8 that fit the meter of their lyrics in German.

Unfortunately, that was a real phone number in many cities, you could dial the short/local number directly without a 0 and the area code back then. Cue prank calls across the country and quite a few scandals since the topic of the song was, after all, the sex trade.

By jp57 2026-03-0515:311 reply

Same thing happened in the USA with 867-5309/Jenny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny#Popularity_and_...

By lproven 2026-03-0612:04

Online, I believe that one bit of Beverley Hills has the highest number of online users in the USA.

I am one.

I have never visited California or the West Coast of the USA in my life.

But I have used dozens of websites which need a Zip code.

I have never had a Zip code. I have postcodes, like my old one IM2 3EW. That has letters. It won't fit a Zip code field.

So I and millions of others use the only Zip code we know:

Beverley Hills 90210.

By runfrook 2026-03-058:26

I worked at a grocery retailer, and we had the same exact thing. The CI/CD pipeline was firing out order related SMS messages to a contractor's number during test runs for years.

I wonder how common something like this is.

By nandomrumber 2026-03-059:451 reply

0412 345 678

That was one number we were told to stop using at Internode. I heard similar stories from Optus and Telstra employees.

By tmtvl 2026-03-0511:46

Someone I know who works at a telco (no idea if Vodafone is a thing in Belgium, but whatever: not Vodafone) was talking about a number someone has: 0411 11 11 11, and they got over a hundred operator messages every day.

By miki123211 2026-03-0512:29

By Nition 2026-03-058:15

I was slightly more inclined to think it might be some bored employee somewhere acting in a sort of Robin Hood capacity just because it's unusually accurate and thorough for a test message. I'd expect more like TEST TEST test DFOIUHDFUOHDFOIUHDFROIHDSFOIHDSF LOREM IPSUM 999999.

Sometimes enthusiastic or particularly bored developers do put in the effort to write things out like a real message though.

By ajuc 2026-03-0510:03

Testing vs prod bugs are always FUN.

In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.

Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.

By JakaJancar 2026-03-0515:47

I have a phone number that is +1(gapless non-decreasing sequence). I’m entertained every week by developers testing.

(Also, people using it as a fake number for some appointment/reservation - which I sometimes update to change their name or add a special request :))

By userbinator 2026-03-056:003 reply

The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?"

I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

By chrismorgan 2026-03-057:141 reply

Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)

At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.

Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.

So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.

By Barbing 2026-03-057:29

Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.

By Nition 2026-03-058:10

From the screenshot it looks like he actually received "only" around 2TB of free mobile data.

By lxgr 2026-03-0510:16

It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.

By lxgr 2026-03-0510:23

> Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

Well, not with that attitude! Initiate a 139-party conference call from your phone and you'll just about make it.

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