Here’s the story: I had a Tracfone a few years ago. I got a different phone and carrier, and I gave the tracfone to my friend, about a year ago.
A month or two later, I switched to Metro – different phone, different carrier, again.
Now a couple weeks ago, he acquired a much nicer Tracfone, all the bells & whistles. Whole different number from his old Tracfone, which used to be mine.
Just now, we were hanging out, and he looked at his phone and said something to the effect that a whole bunch of new numbers had appeared in his contact list. Turns out they were MY contacts, from my phone!!!
I believe I erased all my contacts out of the old tracfone when I gave it to him; besides, that phone, although it is in the house somewhere, has long since lost its charge; and besides THAT, his new tracfone is a different number with no connection at all to the old one. (the old one stayed in my name, the new one is in his.)
How the hell did my contact list from my Metro phone suddenly appear on his Tracfone?
P.S. Realized the contacts list has to have come off of my Metro phone, because there’s somebody’s number that wasn’t in the old Tracfone.
did ask for a new number and have your old number changed to the new number with the new tracphone or did he start a whole new number with no link to the old one?
If the former, i’d say tracphone did it wirelessly.
Does it still have your old SIM card in it? If so, you may have erased your contact list from the phone, but not the SIM card. I’ve done that. Push a few buttons and suddenly the phone is displaying the SIM’s Contact numbers instead of or in addition to the Contacts from phone’s own memory. Or, as **Harmonix **suggests, there’s some sort of Wireless Back-Up or Recovery feature that just got activated, and Tracfone synced his phone’s Contact List to the stuff they’ve got saved. Again, this can happen if you don’t swap out SIM cards - the SIM card is what identifies the phone to the carrier, not the phone number.
Wouldn’t explain why a newer number showed up, but it’s more likely you’re misremembering the timeline than that an entirely different carrier somehow sent your information to an unlinked phone that just happens to be in the possession of someone you know.
You gotta watch cell phones, they do all kids of weird shit.
One think I always like to warn people is put a password on your voice mail.
One day, years ago, I called the SO and it sounded like he answered the phone. I could hear back ground noise like he was driving but he’s not saying anything. Then I hear MY voice coming out of his phone and it’s the message I had left him earlier. I hung up and called back a while later, it goes straight to voice mail and starts playing his messages back to me. Did that off and on all day.
I thought it was just something screwy but I told my niece and she told me her ex-mil’s phone does the same thing. It doesn’t ring, goes straight to voice mail and starts playing the messages. I have a client whose phone does the same thing except he has a password and it will ask for it. The first few times I thought why do I need a password to leave a message?
The scary thing is, the so was/is Nextel/Sprint, the ex-mil is Verizon, and my client is AT&T. None of them have the same phone either, so this isn’t limited to one carrier or one type of phone.
I had a phone I named Linda Blair, but that’s another story.