A Skagit County company’s quest to stop getting calls meant for someone else

Mount Vernon, WA — Breedt R and D in Skagit County is a small company that creates cutting-edge steel designs. They’ve even done work on the new and improved Space Needle.

But what’s burning up Breedt’s phone lines are calls from all over the country.

“We get maybe a dozen calls a day,” says Nancy Gosen, who takes those calls.

The callers are angry. And they kept calling while we were there:

“Y’all charged 84 dollars on my account and I don’t know what the hell it is,” says one caller. “And I want it to stop because if it don’t I’m gonna file charges against y’all.”

They’re demanding refunds from a healthcare company.

“We’re a machine shop and we don’t sell creams or pills and we certainly don’t ship those kinds of things out,” says Nancy.

She says the calls appear to be coming from a single source.

“They are always prefaced by ‘this call is from your google ad’ and I don’t have a google ad,” says Nancy.

Nancy’s company did have a Google ad, though. But she says it was only for a couple of weeks.

“Of course, Google doesn’t have anybody who actually answers the phone. You can’t get a hold of anyone. It’s not something you can explain to a phone tree,” says Nancy.

Emails show the company sent her to a support page. But Nancy says it really didn’t offer her any way to make the calls stop.

We saw complaints from customers all over the country who complained about the same issue. One said “we have received probably over 100 calls and most of those calls are from people seeking other businesses”

And while we were at the shop, another call came in.

“And you never ordered anything from them and they charged your account $88 dollars. And now you can’t get a hold of them,” Nancy discussed with the caller.

We contacted Google. Company representatives confirm Breedt R and D did have a Google Ads number issued to them, but that was disconnected when Breedt closed their account in September. Google also “found no suspicious or policy-violating activity associated with the Google forwarding number.”

But what we do know is that after trying to track down those companies and making calls, the issue just stopped.

And Nancy finally has her business back. So she’s not dealing with angry callers who have the wrong number.

Email Jesse right now at consumer@kiro7.com

Cox Media Group