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TIFU by adding a phone sex hotline to a busy conference call

I used to work at a ransomware remediation firm and my job was basically to analyze how the systems got hacked. Part of my job was to hold phone briefings with a cross section of AV vendors (Microsoft, Symantec, etc) and sometimes law enforcement participated in the highest profile cases (like hospitals or huge retailers, especially if it involves a known threat actor)... This was pre-COVID and bureaucracy moves at snail pace, so we were still using an AT&T teleconferencing service where I first dial into a 1-800 bridge, and then I have to press "* 1" plus a phone number to connect each of the participants to the conference call.

Well, a few months into this job I thought I was such a hotshot that I started connecting all of these conference bridges from memory. So I got Microsoft and Symantec and the FBI connected, was gonna add another company, dialed * 1 and then their 1-800 bridge from memory. To my surprise, I got a sexy female voice going "thank you for calling the hottest voices in America.... Gentlemen press 1 to connect now". Sheer terror took over as I realized I had NO FUCKING CLUE how to disconnect a caller, only how to add a caller. I rummaged around the desk for the little laminated cheat card for the hotkeys. No dice. I hung up my phone hoping it'd end the call. I dialed back in -- " ... ready for real women who just want to fuck .... ".

Running out of ideas I just screamed "HELP" until someone else came into the conference room and pressed another * number combo that dropped the most recent participant. He laughed and was like "Use the hotkeys next time". Apparently, phone sex services frequently reserve 1-800 numbers 1 digit away from conference bridge numbers, and they all knew not to manually dial those numbers. There's some color-coded buttons on the right side of the phone that the company had already preprogrammed to the touch tones for connecting common participants.

Our external partners never let me live it down. Once in a while they still teased me by doing a "welcome to the hottest number in America" impression even when I WebEx them.

TL;DR: I bridged a wrong number into a call with 50+ engineers and government intelligence officials. It happened to be a phone sex line and got more and more explicit.

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