The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: BeanCounter on November 11, 2022, 04:06:54 PM
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My son’s iPhone suddenly stopped being able to text me. He can receive text messages I send him, but when he texts me back I don’t receive it unless he intentionally texts it to my email. Upon further investigation we found that even though my correct phone number is listed under contacts, the number that it texts to is an unknown 1-833 number. We tried deleting my contact and creating a new one but when he selects text to what is my correct phone number, suddenly it sends it to the bogus 1-830 number.
Anybody have any idea what is going on here?
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Yikes. First thing I'd do is take it offline (turn off cellular and wifi) and use some other way to change his Apple ID password.
Hopefully someone else can be more helpful, but google isn't coughing up much for me.
Perhaps some helpful info here - https://www.makeuseof.com/phone-hacked-what-to-do-next/
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And after that, I'd do a hard reset on the phone.
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And after that, I'd do a hard reset on the phone.
Absolutely, nuke it from orbit and start over.
How old is the iPhone? Is it still new enough to be getting security updates?
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Are your son’s contacts synced to any sort of cloud service (iCloud, Google, Microsoft Exchange, etc.)? If so there could be some glitch where the cloud service thinks this is your phone number and isn’t listening to your attempts to change it back on the phone.
To check, you can go to Settings -> Mail -> Accounts and look whether it says “Contacts” under any of the listed accounts. If it does, you could try tapping on any accounts that are synchronizing contacts and turn contacts off. Then change your number on the phone and see if it sticks. If it does, the problem is with the cloud service rather than the phone.
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Thank you all so much for the advice!
@Blackeagle I will try this tonight, before we do a hard reset.
Its an iPhone SE 2020. Bought it last fall.
If we do a hard reset then he would lose all his contacts right?
I think we are just barely still under warranty so I can probably take it to the Apple Store but I would love to avoid spend a morning there!
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Did a google search of the 1-833 number yield anything? An old employer toll-free number maybe? There's some advice here for an iphone that texts a contact's other numbers instead of the default cell phone:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250802681
Updating carrier settings is something I wouldn't have thought about.
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Google search and attempt to call number brought back nothing. Just “call cannot be placed as dialed”.
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If we do a hard reset then he would lose all his contacts right?
Not if you back up the iPhone in iCloud first:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211228