Letter From a Reader: My Mobile Number is Being Used by Another Person

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Dear Fashion PULIS,

This certain Telecommunications company allowed my cell number (since 2004) to be used by an another person.

This all started 2 weeks ago when I was getting unknown texts addressed to a certain Jen - and upon my inquiry, they are saying this Jen person is using a number same as mine. I already had my SIM changed last week thinking the problem will go away. But still I continue to get this Jen's texts, but to a lesser degree. At the back of my mind I was thinking, if this Jen person was able to text these people using my number, surely she can make calls too. And true enough, this month's bill was proof of that. Good thing I saved some of the unknown texts' numbers and compared it to my bill. Shocking. These unknown numbers appeared on my bill. From my usual P5000 bill it became P8000++ . The bulk of my bill went to the long calls this Jen made to other networks (2-3 hour calls). There was one particular number my phone supposedly called - total calls to this one number alone was over P3000.

As I write this, I'm on the phone with a the customer representative and they agreed to adjust/lower my bill by P2000, then plus the rewards points that I converted into rebates should lower my bill significantly. Also, I was able to get a hold of this Jen's sister just now (from one of the text numbers I investigated) and she assured me that Jen finally changed her number 2 weeks ago. The sister apologized profusely and offered to pay my bill but since I'm a nice guy - I decided to let it pass. What concerns me is that this telecommunications company has done a really sloppy job on phone security. I will still have to wait for next month's bill to see if it would go back to a normal amount. In fairness, the customer and technical service were polite and tried their best to appease me.

I pray this doesn't happen to you.

Yours truly,
Brian Cua