I used to work for a moderately sized ski resort in Vermont, when I was in high school back in the 80's. This was back when credit card impressions were made on multi-part carbon paper receipts. Customer got one copy, merchant got another.

At the end of the day on a busy weekend, there would be thousands of credit card swipes, and the receipts locked in a vault in the offices. Part of my job was doing data entry at night during downtime. I'd check out a box of credit card receipts and enter the last name (from the signature) and the phone number (written by the customer on the slip) into a terminal. That was sent to a company in Ohio in batches of 50-60 thousand names. They matched name with phone number and sent back full addresses for our marketing department.

In 1989.

So, it's not at all surprising that they were able to piece this info together, and like others have pointed out, it's very possible they're matching your info to past purchases, returns or warranty information.

It's not that hard to do - credit card companies make big money selling lists of customers. they probably got it from your card issuer.

So are all those people walking down the street with phones to their heads using some kind of new wireless protocol to download direct-to-brain? I think it's a bit of a stretch to assert that "Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones," without some serious numbers as back up. VOIP penetration on mobile phones just isn't that high yet.

...then again, I'm one of those curmudgeons who thinks that a phone's primary purpose should be, well, a phone. Occasional text messaging is ok, as is the odd flight tracking or score checking session, but other than that i just want to be able to talk on my phone with a minimum of fuss. that's harder and harder to do these days.