LITTLE ROCK — “Hey there, hot stuff,” the breathy voice says. “I’ve been waiting for your call. Are you ready for some tantalizing fun?”
That’s what Mignon Burns of Hensley heard when she dialed the number she thought was the Social Security Administration.
She was trying to get answers about her son’s disability payments.
Instead, she got giggles,seductive music, sultry suggestions and a prompt to enter a credit-card number to pay for phone sex by the minute.
“This is offensive,” Burns said Tuesday.
The problem stemmed from a handwritten phone number that appears in a letter Burns said she got from the Social Security Administration. Burns was added as a payee for her son’s benefit since he suffered brain damage in a car wreck, she said.
Out of frustration Tuesday, she shared the letter containing the naughty number with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
She said she has not been able to resolve her benefits questions or to find out why someone would have written such a number on her letter.
“One lady at national hung up on me,” Burns said.
At least one thing the phone sex operation and the Social Security Administration have in common is that it can be hard to get a human on the line. A reporter’s attempts to get beyond automated prompts at either the sex line or the administration’s Little Rock office failed.
A Social Security spokesman in Dallas, however, said Burns’ issue seems to be unique.
“It must have been an error, and of course we regret that,” Donna Brousseau said.
The sex-line number is similar to the phone number for the administration’s Little Rock office. The correct number, which is also included in the letter, is (866) 593-0933.
The last four digits are different for the phone-sex line.
Burns’ trouble didn’t stop when she hung up. She said she was bombarded afterward with sexually explicit text messages.
She had called from her cell phone.
“We had to get our text messages cut off completely,” she said.
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 12/30/2009