Netflix has edited out a phone number that appears in its hit series Squid Game after a South Korean woman and others who use similar combinations were deluged with calls – with some callers even asking to join the show’s life-or-death games.
The South Korea-made
production has topped Netflix popularity charts in
90 countries since its launch last month and is on track to become its most
watched series ever.
The nine-episode drama, which addresses widening
economic inequality, involves hundreds of cash-strapped people competing in
children’s games to win the final reward of 45.6bn Korean won ((£28m), with the losers killed
in uncompromising and violent ways.
To take part, contestants
have to call a number on a business card printed with symbols. But while film
and television makers usually use fake numbers in such circumstances, adding
010 – the standard prefix for South Korean mobiles – to the eight digits on the
card generated a real phone number.
It belongs to a South
Korean woman who said she received thousands of calls and text messages to her
phone “to the point that it’s hard for me to go on with daily life”.
“This is a number that I’ve
been using for more than 10 years, so I’m quite taken aback. There are more
than 4,000 numbers that I’ve had to delete from my phone,” the businesswoman
told the South Korean newspaper Money Today.
“At first I didn’t know
why, but my friend told me that my number came out in Squid
Game and that’s when I realized,” she said, adding that some pranksters
asked in the dead of night “to join Squid Game” before hanging up.
In a statement, Netflix
asked fans to refrain from prank calls and messages. “Together with the
production company, we are working to resolve this matter, including editing
scenes with phone numbers where necessary,” the company said.
The woman said it was
impossible for her to change her number due to client contacts. She is reported
to have rejected compensation offers of up to 5m won, though Netflix has not
commented on the compensation claims.
But on Thursday the
eight-digit number that appears in the first two episodes was replaced with a
six-digit version. When called, an automated response said: “The number you
have dialed is not available.”
From The Guardian
