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.
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...
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.
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
This sounds hilarious, how many physical items are we talking? Like his whole front porch full up of contract boxes?
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
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.
0412 345 678
That was one number we were told to stop using at Internode. I heard similar stories from Optus and Telstra employees.
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.
see also:
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery
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.
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.