What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.
"Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"
Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a few years!
I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing anything that might tip off either of those groups that my number is ripe for the picking.
Nobody dials numbers any more.
I also had an answering machine, and eventually, I got a long diatribe from the irate person whose number had been linked to mine who was very upset about the situation. They explained the phone company had accidently linked the numbers somehow. They were very upset because their friends couldn't reach them and because I had been call blocking them.
So, I listened to the message, thought a moment and then added them to my call block list.
Seems an odd coincidence for it to be fwd to her number of all people.
Calling a business though? A colleague had a problem where their number was 1 digit off from some delivery number (maybe pizza?) and got calls all the time.
Someone else erroneously has their number (different area code) in the google info for another business, same problem and took a while to fix.
It's good to have a few numbers memorized. What happens if your phone dies, and you need to call someone? If you don't know any phone numbers, you have an problem.
I dial a few of my contacts by number, just to set them in memory.
(I’d probably just ignore it, though.)