Hungry Jack’s App Flagged the World’s Most Common Surname as Inappropriate: “Please Remove to Continue”

Warning: This article references profanity filters and flagged language

This week, a Reddit user shared a screenshot showing that Australian fast-food chain Hungry Jack’s refused to let them create an account because their surname, Wang, was flagged as “inappropriate language.

The screenshot was posted to r/mildlyinfuriating.

The message on the sign-up screen read: "Last Name contains inappropriate language. Please remove to continue."

Wang is considered the most common surname worldwide. According to genealogy site Forebears, more than 106 million people carry the name. A 2018 survey found that it ranks first in China, where over 100 million citizens hold it. The name derives from a Mandarin word meaning “king” or “prince,” with roots going back to the Zhou dynasty.

Thus, the original post (tagged "I just wanted a hot dog") led commenters to describe it as a classic Scunthorpe problem.

The Scunthorpe problem refers to automated systems blocking harmless content by automated filters that scan for offensive strings within larger words or names, without understanding the context.

According to Wikipedia, the term originated in April 1996, when AOL's filter did not allow residents of the English town of Scunthorpe create accounts, because the town's name contains a vulgarity. So while the filter easily found the offensive string of letters, it didn't know it was a place name.

"You'd think every IT person in existence would be taught about the Scunthorpe problem by now," wrote a user. The problem with Wang, too, is that the filter scans for a slang term and flags any surname that contains the targeted characters. Automated systems often fail to account for cultural or linguistic context.

Thanks to these content filters, in 2004, a man in Scotland named Craig Cockburn (pronounced "Coburn") was blocked by Hotmail, and the Horniman Museum in London had emails blocked by filtering systems.

Under this post, a user described having a hyphenated first name that caused a delivery app to reject her ID because the app had removed the hyphen during sign-up. The name on the ID didn't match the name on the order. The app required the delivery driver to return the package with no way to override the system. Another commenter noted that names with apostrophes are rejected by systems that cannot handle non-ASCII characters. A third shared that a coworker whose name was transliterated from Chinese as "Shiting Sun" had difficulties with automated systems. One user with the surname "Li" pointed out that some platforms reject their name because it falls below a minimum-length requirement.

Tech experts note that the fix is that users blocked by such filters can try entering a slight variation of the surname (maybe adding a period or extra space, for example) to bypass the substring match.

Contacting the company's customer support and requesting a manual account review is another option, too, though the process may take longer.

The longer-term solution, however, is for companies to implement context-aware filtering that uses natural language processing.

Hungry Jack's has not responded to the incident as of now.