Netflix was forced to make change to Squid Game after mistake made woman’s life extremely ‘difficult’
Topics: Squid Game, Netflix, Film and TV
Lucy Devine
Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Squid Game, Netflix, Film and TV
If you watched the first season of Squid Game, no doubt you've been spending Twixmas binge-watching the second season, which dropped on the streaming platform on Boxing Day.
Created by South Korean film director Hwang Dong-hyuk, Squid Game quickly became one of Netflix's most viewed TV shows.
To date, it has attracted an audience of 330 million and more than 2.8 billion hours.
But following the success of the first season, creators of the show had to make a change after realising they had seriously impacted one woman's life by mistake.
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The second season follows the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae, three years after he first won the Squid Game.
Gi-hun returns to participate in - and take down - the games, once again facing off against new participants.
But this time around, there's a slight difference with one detail.
In the first season, viewers see Gi-hun receive a business card with an eight-digit number.
However, the number wasn't actually a fake, created for the series. In fact, once the South Korean prefix of 010 was added, it became a real phone number.
Unfortunately, the woman that the number belonged to had an influx of calls from people all over the globe, ringing to check if the number was real.
“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.” Kim Gil-young from Seongju, South Korea, told Money Today at the time.
“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.
“At first, I didn’t know what it meant, but I found out when my friends told me, ‘Your number appears in Squid Game'."
Gil-young wasn’t able to simply change her phone number, as she used it for business, so she contacted Netflix and production company Siren Pictures to try and fix the problem.
In a statement at the time, Netflix said: "Together with the production company, we are working to resolve this matter, including editing scenes with phone numbers where necessary."
The number was changed and it was replaced with digits that could not be used as a phone number.