Did he really dial this number?

[Countrylad]

A (granted fairly ’ mature’ ) friend called his electricity, landline and broadband supplier from his landline , to ask them to send him a link to reset his email password. He dialled their number, as opposed to using a contacts list. The person who answered said he couldn’t help re the link but suggested whilst he was there, they review his contracts to see if they were still best for him. In the course of a long (45 minute plus) call he ended up agreeing to change to a new supplier for power and broadband. He immediately realised that he’d made a serious mistake and rang  his current supplier again to cancel it all - they were rather surprised by his story! The number on his itemised account for  his first call turns out to be one of a well-known price-comparison company BUT is not listed on their web site. So .....how could he have dialled a long, unfamiliar and indeed unpublished number by mistake ? He’s adamant about his story, whilst recognising he was a little foolish. Are there any engineering answers?

[iniltous]

Where did they get the telephone number from ?, quite often , if you ‘google’ a company name , the first ‘result’ isn’t the company you want, but a paid for advert from another company , looking to take advantage of the unwary, you dial the number from the ‘web’ assuming it’s the number for the company you want , but it’s not, and because the company paying for the advert is relying on the punter not noticing, they are not likely to say ‘oh we’re are not xxx company’ , they will imply they are that company.

This practice is quite often immoral, but surprisingly isn’t illegal , but TBH, if I thought I had called (for example ) BT , and the apparent BT employee was keen to to switch me to another company ‘to save me money’  ( as if a BT employee could even do that ) I would be ending the call immediately, because even if it’s not technically a ‘scam’ it’s certainly sharp practice , the misleading advert on the web is designed to look authentic for the company you are searching for, so it’s not just the ‘elderly’ that are fooled.

As for is it possible that they called the correct number, but somehow the call was rerouted to someone else, the answer is ‘No’

[Countrylad]

He realised he’d been a silly boy very quickly , hence the immediate call  to his current supplier . I believe he took the  number he maintains he called from his bill,  but I will check. However the point is, that even if he’d googled and confused  the result, the number that this ‘third party aggregator’ provides on their website  is NOT the one   shown on his itemised bill. All very mysterious!

[iniltous]

I suppose googling the same company yourself and checking if anything intentionally misleading adverts are returned , a company having alternative numbers to the published ‘main’ number isn’t unusual, a pretty simple way of counting the number of enquiry’s through a particular ‘channel’ is to give each ‘channel’ its own number , there will no doubt be other phone numbers that get through to the same company.

The number on the itemised bill is what was physically dialled , the phone itself may even keep a list of the last 10 or 20 calls made , so it possibly could be checked that way too....if a called number is on ‘divert’ , for example a plumber publishes his ‘landline’ number , but when out on a job puts that landline onto divert to their mobile, anyone calling the landline number gets diverted at the plumbers expense, but it’s only the landline number shown on the callers bill , the diverted portion of the call is on the plumbers landline bill....so the number on your friends bill is the number they dialled, you could , if you want, simply call that number and when answered ask the person who answers what company they represent.
If your friend is confident they got the number from a bill from their  current provider , then that number would be shown on the itemised bill , not the number for the comparison site, another clue may be the company representative apparently wasn’t surprised to be called in error for a ‘random’ company and was primed ready to look for alternative suppliers, all a little to coincidental, like it was commonplace to get calls meant for someone else.

TBH these days I doubt anyone bothers looking up numbers from paperwork when a simple search will get the info needed, it’s just the unscrupulous as well as the genuine know this and will seek to take advantage  especially as the search engine prioritise the order in which the returns are shown, usually based on who pays the most to be the number one ‘hit’