‘Squid Game’ has been a rage right from the start. Since its debut, the audience was hooked and couldn’t wait for the next installment. Now as we speak, ‘Squid Game 2’ is keeping the audience hooked to the edge of their seats. It is needless to say the series has engaged the audience with a big dose of entertainment; however, did you know that in season one this high-stakes drama actually brought chaos to a woman’s life?
Here’s what happened…
When in 2021 Season 1 of ‘Squid Game’ made its debut on Netflix, it began with the protagonist GI-Hun receiving a mysterious business card with an eight-digit phone number. The creators wanted to enhance the plot’s suspense and intensity with the card’s mystery, but what they didn’t know was that the digits used were of an active phone number. Paired with South Korea’s mobile prefix, 010, it became the number of a Seongju resident, Kim Gil-young.
Kim Gil-young was using the number for over a decade, and while the show reached new heights, things turned into a nightmare for the South Korean woman, as curious fans began dialing the number to check if it was real.
In 2021, Gil-young told Money Today, that people would call and text her around the clock.
“Since Squid Game aired, I’ve been receiving texts and calls 24 hours a day, to the point where it’s difficult to live my daily life. This is a number I’ve used for more than 10 years. I’ve had to delete over 4,000 numbers from my phone,” she shared.
Constant phone calls killed Kim’s phone battery and she wasn’t initially aware of what was happening until friends informed her about the show and the display of her number.
Netflix’s action on the matter
The woman was using the number for business purposes for over a decade and thus, didn’t want to change it. When she reached out to the OTT giant and the production company, action was taken immediately. They edited out her phone number just weeks after the show’s release. The unusable set: 010-034 replaced the initially used real numbers. Netflix and Siren Pictures also issued statements requesting fans to stop calling and texting Kim.
