Normally, getting a piping-hot pizza from a local restaurant delivered to your door is a good thing, but not if you didn’t order it and don’t want to pay for it.
That’s what Chilliwack’s Amber Gibbons has been dealing with over the last month as a parade of unwanted food orders have shown up at her house.
The order are all made from a 778 phone number that she doesn’t recognize, and this person has sent just about every restaurant in town to her address.
It started a month ago.
While Gibbons and her husband were at work, two restaurants tried to deliver food. Gibbons was home a couple nights later when a pizza showed up. Three minutes after that person left, another delivery arrived.
“I heard a knock on my door and thought it was the same guy, so I went all the way downstairs and sure enough it was a different guy, from Dominos,” Gibbons recalled. “And I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.'”
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Gibbons asked the Dominos person for the phone number attached to the order, and bingo, it was the same mysterious 778 number she’d discovered on a previous order.
“I looked in my phone. I looked in my son’s phone. Nobody knows this phone number,” she said.
Gibbons started dialing Chilliwack restaurants, asking them to not take orders from that number.
“And while I was on the phone with Jim’s Pizzeria, that phone number called in to make a $70 order to my address,” Gibbons said.
All of the orders have been in the $70 to $100 range and on one busy night there were four delivery people from four different restaurants knocking on her door.
“I was trying to wrack my brain to figure out which restaurants hadn’t come here yet,” she said. “One of them was Demetre’s Pizza, and sure enough, just a couple days ago Demetre’s showed up at the door.
“Whoever it is is smart enough to not order from Skip the Dishes or something where you have to pay ahead of time. They are literally ordering from every restaurant in Chilliwack where you can pay at the door.
It got to the point where Gibbons phoned the RCMP.
‘They said, ‘I know it’s a pain in the ass for you, but you’re not really the victim here,” Gibbons said. “It’s the restaurants that are losing the money, and if they want to call in a complaint, they can.”
A couple restaurants told Gibbons they will do exactly that, and she is wondering if anyone else has experienced the same problem.
“Honest to God, I don’t have enemies, so I don’t know why this is happening,” she said. “I thought about putting the phone number on Facebook because he may be ordering food to other addresses. But I have no idea.”
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