Netflix accidentally ruined a woman’s life so they had to change Squid Game

As everyone tucks into Squid Game Season 2 alongside their Christmas leftovers, now is the perfect opportunity to revisit the time the Netflix series accidentally ruined a woman’s life and had to change a significant detail. 

It’s been three long years since its debut, but Squid Game Season 2 was well worth the wait. As we said in our five-star review, it “makes the first chapter of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s masterful Netflix series seem like child’s play.”

The story picks up three years after Seong Gi-hun left the airport sporting a red barnet. Now, he’s deadset on seeking revenge and putting a stop to the deadly games for good. 

The finale ends with a heart-thumping gunfight and subsequent cliffhanger, paving the way for an epic third and final chapter. It goes without saying Squid Game is entirely fictional, but Season 1 did have real-life consequences for one woman. 

How Squid Game caused a real-life crisis

Netflix

Remember the eight-digit number on the Squid Game business card Gi-hun receives in the first episode of Season 1? Turns out, if you added 010 – the South Korean mobile prefix – it made a real phone number. 

In 2021, a woman from Seongju, South Korea learned this the hard way. When Squid Game first debuted, it quickly became the most watched show in 90 countries worldwide, and soon enough viewers started calling the number to see if it was real. 

Speaking with newspaper Money Today at the time, the woman, later revealed to be Kim Gil-young, said she was inundated with texts and calls from thousands of people, so much so that it made it “difficult” for her to live her daily life. 

“Since the airing of Squid Game, I’ve been receiving texts and calls 24 hours a day, to the point where it’s difficult to live my daily life,” she said. 

“This is a number that I’ve been using for more than 10 years, so I’m quite taken aback. There are more than 4,000 numbers that I’ve had to delete from my phone.

“I get calls out of curiosity day and night without any sense of time, to the point where my phone battery would run out in half a day.”

The number appeared again in Episode 2, although it took a while for Gil-young to figure out just what the hell was going on. 

“At first, I didn’t know what it meant, but I found out when my friends told me, ‘Your number appears in Squid Game,’” she added. 

Changing her number wasn’t an option due to the fact that she used it for business, and so she tried to go straight to the source, contacting Netflix and production company Siren Pictures.

An attorney weighed in on whether she might have had a legal case, telling the outlet that while it’s difficult to make a definitive statement, it may have been in violation of the Personal Information Protection Act.

“You can be sentenced to up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 50 million won,” they said – but thankfully it didn’t come to that. 

Netflix fixes issue ahead of Squid Game Season 2

Netflix was pretty swift in resolving the issue. A couple of weeks later, it edited out the woman’s phone number, replacing it with an unusable series of digits: 010-034.

The move came after the streaming service and Siren said they were looking into the matter while asking fans to refrain from prank calls and messages. 

Apparently, it was never meant to be an issue, but what the two companies didn’t realize is that when people dialled the original eight-digit number in the country, it automatically added the prefix to complete it. 

Gil-young bore the brunt of this mishap, although thankfully it was swiftly resolved and no doubt served as a learning curve for future productions. 

In Squid Game Season 2, that business card does show up again, only this time they’ve made sure no one would be dialing the wrong number – literally.

Squid Game Season 2 is streaming on Netflix now. You can read about why Season 3 has to be the last, what the show was inspired by, and more great TV shows to stream this month.