A company in Murcia is receiving a barrage of calls because its phone number appears in the mythical series The Simpsons. The telecommunications company InnaTic, located in Alcantarilla (Murcia), has the mobile phone number that can be seen in the 12×22 episode, entitled ‘Dad has a new plate’ and broadcast for the first time in Spain 21 years ago.
The revival of old episodes of The Simpsons thanks to their inclusion on platforms like Disney+ makes the process of reviewing certain content much easier. For example, it only takes a few clicks to subscribe to Disney+ and be able to watch an episode as old as the season 12 finale.
InnaTic or Spring Shield from The Simpsons?
The phone number appears in the chapter titled ‘Dad has a new license plate’, in which Homer Simpson has a new business idea in which he creates a citizen security patrol. Promote this patrol in an ad and there appears the telephone number that InnaTic also shares: 636 555 347. The curious thing is that in the episode the number ends with a two, but people are calling the first nine numbers that appear in screen.
What they get when they call is to contact a Murcian company dedicated to telecommunications advice. Lately, he has recently been receiving calls and WhatsApp messages asking for “Spring Shield”.
In statements to EFE, the employee and manager of the line, Alicia Manzanares, explained that she received the first WhatsApp message in 2021 and in it she was asked “for something that she had no idea what it was”. Last year an unknown number put him in context on WhatsApp and it was when they found out that they shared a telephone line with a citizen surveillance service that appeared in The Simpsons, even providing him with the name of the chapter.
Since then, the calls have followed one another and she even answers them when they ask about Spring Shield, armed with patience about it.
Does the legislation protect in these cases?
If you’re a fan of The Simpsons, you’ll probably even enjoy sharing your number with someone who appeared on the show, but in the end you can end up receiving a huge amount of calls and messages. To avoid many of the problems mentioned above, since the 1960s, restrictions on numbering in the United States were established and telephone numbers with the 555 prefix were saved for use in fiction, so it is strange why it was not done in this episode.
It was chosen because, on the alphanumeric keyboard, 5 corresponds to the letters J, K, and L, and no geographic name in the United States (county, state, or similar) begins with all three letters in a row. In fact, in The Simpsons we can see a parody of the use of this fictitious prefix in the mythical chapter of The Simpsons Mr. Snowplow, where Homer in his ad asks to call KL5-3226 (the letters KL are used to indicate two fives in phone numbers).
The dissemination of personal and family data is criminalized in article 197 of the Spanish Penal Code, since the right to privacy of individuals is being violated. However, in this case the chapter probably predates the use of the line numbering and is even a partial coincidence, so if those affected wanted to get rid of the calls, the easiest solution would be to change the number. Precisely with regard to this, they assure that they will not do so because an anonymous caller advised them to keep the number “as if it were gold because it appears in the best television series in history.”
