ST. CLOUD, Fla. – When the phone rings inside Ginny St. Dennis's home, it could be one of her friends or family members calling.
But most likely, the callers turn out to be complete strangers trying to reach their cable company.
[WEB EXTRAS: Remove erroneous YP listing | Florida Do Not Call List ]
"Is this Bright House?" the callers ask.
"No, I'm sorry. It's not," St. Dennis responds before explaining to the callers that they've contacted a private home instead of the cable and internet provider.
A few miles away, Rose St. Peter receives phone calls at her Kissimmee home from Bright House Networks customers who have overdue bills.
"A lady called me the other day and said, 'I've been trying to get a hold of you. Please call back because I want to pay my bill'," said St. Peter.
In Winter Garden, Eva Coleman has received so many calls for Bright House Networks on her home phone she jokes that the cable company should send her a paycheck.
"I'm like an operator for Bright House," said Coleman. "(The calls) were coming in like every 5 minutes, every 10 minutes."
In each case, the homeowners' contact information had been incorrectly published in an online telephone directory.
YP, which prints The Real Yellow Pages phone book, also offers an extensive online telephone and address directory on their company's website.
When Central Floridians searched for "Bright House" on YP.com, 148 different entries appeared.
Most of the listings were incorrect.
Only nine of the YP.com entries provided accurate contact information for Bright House Networks offices, a News 6 investigation has found. The rest included either an incorrect phone number, an incorrect address, or both.
In many cases, the addresses and phone numbers listed for Bright House Networks on YP.com actually belonged to people like Coleman.
"On Saturday morning, Sunday morning they would call early," said the Winter Garden woman. "A lot of times I'd think it was something very important and come get the phone. And then I'd hear(the caller ask), 'Is this Bright House?'"
"It gets ridiculous when you have 7, 8 calls a day," said St. Dennis. "They'd leave messages on the answering machine. Really irate messages."
St. Dennis and her husband have also received mail addressed to "Bright House Networks" and once had an unexpected visitor show up at their St. Cloud home.
"I had somebody knock on the door and ask if we were Bright House," said St. Dennis.
Bright House Networks customers have also stopped by Coleman's house.
"They came to pay their bill or pick up their (cable equipment)," she said.
Coleman and St. Dennis said they notified Bright House Networks about the unwanted calls, but their phones kept ringing.
"We've had the same phone number for 30 years," St. Dennis's husband Andy told News 6. "Hopefully you can have something done because we couldn't."
Shortly after News 6 contacted YP representatives for comment, the couple's contact information vanished from the company's website.
"Thanks for bringing this to our attention," said YP spokesman Stephan West. "All erroneous 'Bright House' listings should now be removed from YP.com."
It's unclear when the incorrect phone numbers were first published online.
"YP leverages a number of third party data providers to augment our own internal listings data," said West. "We've tracked the source of these erroneous listings to one of those providers and have contacted the provider with this information to have them update their databases."
YP did not disclose what company provided them with the incorrect phone numbers, which may have also shared the inaccurate listings with other online telephone directories.
St. Dennis's address and home phone number are still associated with Bright House Networks on dozens of other websites including Mapquest, Manta, and 411.com.
Since St. Dennis's information was removed from YP.com, she said the number of Bright House customers calling her home has dropped to only about one per week.
"I kind of miss having someone to talk to every day," she joked.