Google's AI Is Handing Out Strangers' Phone Numbers Instead of Service Contacts

Once a month, Google Gemini returns completely random phone numbers when users search for specialists' contact details. People whose numbers end up in the results get swamped for months with calls from strangers looking for lawyers, designers or locksmiths.

How it started

One Reddit user wrote in desperation that his phone had been ringing for a month. Strangers were asking for services he does not provide: they needed attorneys, product designers, locksmiths. In March, an Israeli programmer got the same thing via WhatsApp: he was flooded with requests from people who had found his number through Google Gemini while looking for recommendations.

What actually happened

When users asked Google Gemini to search (for example, "find a good lawyer in New York"), the system returned random phone numbers from the internet index instead of real firms' contacts. This is not an error in a single record: Google collects numbers from thousands of sites, and the system simply started serving them up without checking relevance.

The danger is that the number is not filtered. A person looks for a lawyer and gets a neighbor's number. Or the number of someone who moved away long ago, but whose old number remained in some directory.

The consequences

• People get waves of calls from strangers for weeks and months
• The numbers spread across the internet via social networks and forums
• Entire campaigns demand explanations from Google on Reddit and Twitter
• There are suspicions of legal claims and complaints to the FTC

Gemini's algorithm did not start returning numbers the day before yesterday; the problem built up over months. Google stayed silent for a long time. In the end it ran into publicity: people wrote on Reddit and TikTok and began sharing their stories.

What this means

Google's generative search is not yet ready to replace regular search. If the system cannot reliably return the right contact, it is worse than useless: it harms real people. Google promised to look into it, but the fix mechanism remains unclear. It is a reminder that AI in production must pass far stricter checks before being released to the masses.

*Meta is recognized as an extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation.