Home phone News

Cable theft causes ‘wrong number’ landline chaos in Surrey

Thursday 27 October, 2011

By Anthony Hill

Phone cable thieves cause confusion in Surrey after several households were reconnected with incorrect telephone numbers.

A handful of BT customers in Guildford have been receiving bizarre phone calls from people they don’t know - and it’s down to the dirty work of cable thieves.

Local news website GetSurrey reported how telephone cables were recently stolen from the Wanborough Hill area, wiping out landline connections in several nearby villages for more than a week.

But since being reconnected, some household have found themselves still unable to make calls, while others seem to have been given a different phone number entirely.

Pauline Rodgers, 79, and her husband Thomas, 82, noticed the problem last Monday when they began receiving phone enquiries about a mystery gentleman.

“Now and again we would get a call saying ‘hi, is that Charlie?’” Mrs Rodgers explained. “We had no idea what was going on at first, but after the third call we realised what must have happened.”

A spokesman for BT said: “During complex repairs such as this there can be instances where individual lines can be connected incorrectly.”

The cable theft also left a phone user from Aldershot confused, when she tried to call her mother-in-law, but was instead connected to a fax machine.

Residents have praised home phone provider BT for sending engineers so quickly. Most of the faults are now thought to have been put right, but concerned residents have been urged to contact BT for assistance.

A recent poll by Asda Mobile revealed that, despite an increase in “mobile-only” households, around 63% of British households still use a landline to make calls. This figure rises to more than 80% among the UK’s over-55 population.