A South Korean man has reportedly been bombarded with thousands of calls and text messages after his phone number was inadvertently revealed in the new hit Netflix show Squid Game.
The phone number features in the first episode of the South Korean drama, which became the streaming giant’s most watched show, surpassing Bridgerton to the top spot.
The show follows contestants fighting for survival in a Hunger Games-style game show to win a multi million pound prize.
The show’s main character Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a divorcee in serious debt with a loan shark due to a gambling addiction, is approached by a man at a train station and offered the chance to win a sum of money that will change his life.
The real life eight-digit phone number features on a business card which is given to Seong Gi-hun to enlist him in the survival game.
However, a man living in Gyeonggi Province in South Korea has since said the number belongs to him and he has been receiving around 4,000 calls a day from callers who “sounded like kids” hoping to join the brutal game, the South China Morning Post reports.
The man, who is in his 40s, reportedly at first believed they were spam calls and texts, as he was unaware of the Netflix series, until a caller explained his number is shown on the programme.
He said he has been receiving phone calls through the early hours of the morning as well as text messages and pictures, allegedly forcing him to take sleeping pills to cope.
Yet the man says it would be inconvenient to change his phone number as he has used it for work for the past decade.
He also said that his wife is receiving similar fan calls as her number is the same number except for the last digit.
Netflix are reportedly in negotiations with the phone number owner to resolve the issue, according to the national paper Korea Times.
