Unwanted calls and texts from strange men were received on a teen girl’s cellphone because the previous user of the cellphone number was an escort. CBS 2’s Audrina Bigos reports.
A mother of a teenage girl told CBS Chicago that her 13-year-old daughter was getting frequent calls from strange men on her new cellphone. Some were asking for “Pebbles”.
The concerned mom discovered that “Pebbles” is real, is live and waiting … she was in lingerie. She discovered the phone number was previously assigned to a woman working as an escort.
T-Mobile had given her daughter a recycled number when she activated her cellphone.
T-mobile said they have no way to vet the numbers when they are assigned to a new customer, but they gave the woman’s daughter a new phone number to solve the urgent problem.
Phone numbers can be recycled in 60 days.
As a precaution, parents should search a phone number online as soon as a new phone number is assigned. Check the phone number while in the T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless store or other cell phone store as soon as the cellular service is activated, or before the phone service is activated, if possible.
Search the number with hyphens between the area code and the prefix, and search the number without hyphens. The search with the hyphens is the method most likely to generate search results. From the search results, check at least the first three to five search result pages for suspicious results.
Be care to avoid actually entering the pages referred by or connected to the search results. If possible, use the Google link to the cached version of the page to avoid actually visiting the page and to avoid generating cookies that show a history to the resulting web page (e.g., an escort website).
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