Every call I’ve ever had that was a wrong number, misdailed number, pocket dial or whatever that wasn’t supposed to be for me turned out to be a spam call or marketing call for something. Most of the time, it was a way for me to confirm my number to some dumb marketer.
For the past year or two, I answer all mysterious calls I don’t recognize and put it immediately on ‘mute’. If the person calling doesn’t identify themselves … I let them hang up first and then I just block the number. If they identify themselves with some weird marketing message … I let them hang up and then block the number.
I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us
One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don’t want the person they’re with to know they’re calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you’re calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions
Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there’s a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that’s universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn’t part of my training.