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Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago there was a silly game, the topic was to make friends with "phone number neighbors" whose phone number is just one digit away.

I gave it a try, texted $(my_number + 1) and said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"

Their reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"

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I met a girl whose birthday is the day after mine, and the last 4 digits of her phone number was also mine +1.

Sadly she turned me down when I asked her out.

That was a near miss.

Maybe in the next lifetime (i.e. this lifetime plus 1)..

It was probably the wrong time.

I got a call from a spam caller who spoofed the caller ID to be $(my_number - 1).

They said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"

My reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"

At that point, any reply back from the original sender just proves them to be legitimate (ie. able to receive messages on the originator phone number, so not spoofing it).

I misread GP and thought they made a call, rather than sent a text.

I would assume this was a spammer/scammer trying to verify if they could reach a real person at my number.

Even if the originator phone number was indeed one minus yours?

Yes, I’m especially wary of unknown callers if they share the first 6 digits of my phone number. I don’t think I have ever received a legitimate phone call from one.

The whole one digit away thing could easily be a tactic a scammer uses.

Seems like a bad strategy if people are conditioned to distrust it.

In rural areas of the US, ALL of the phone numbers (at least until somewhat recently ) would share the same first 6 digits. Even now there are very few possible exchange prefixes in my area, though a lot of people's mobile phones are tied to another exchange prefix (phones not purchased locally/owner moved to the area and kept their old number)

> Seems like a bad strategy if people are conditioned to distrust it.

Most people live where they grew up. Those people aren't conditioned to distrust it. They're also probably underrepresented on HN.

I get the occasional call or message from numbers with the same area code and exchange as my number, and they're universally spam. If I saw one that was one number off mine I wouldn't think "oh, somebody's having fun, I'll answer / text back", I'd think "huh they're bothering to fake more digits now."

What shell are you using? For bash, that's got to be $(( $my_number + 1 ))

It was pseudo-code :-)

I always titter when I see arithmetic in shell operations.

In Python, one would merely do:

    export mynumber="+4912341234123"
    python3 -c "import pip; pip.main(['install', 'phonenumbers']); \
    import phonenumbers; x = phonenumbers.parse(\"$mynumber\", None); \
    x.national_number = x.national_number + 1; \
    print(x)"

Just plain and simple, really.

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