Someone else's text messages.

June 13, 2015 7:23 PM

Outgoing and incoming texts from someone else showed on an iPhone today. How or why would this happen?

My wife's phone shows two outgoing messages from May 12 and one incoming message from today. All three showed up earlier today, she didn't send them and neither of us recognize the incoming number. She has an iPhone 5s with iOS 8.3 and she uses the stock message app, no bells or whistles. Any ideas why this would happen? The context appears as though the month old response is to the previous messages, "Should we meet for dinner?" (outgoing May 12 from our phone) "If you want to" (incoming today). Weird and mysterious

posted by andywolf to Technology (7 answers total)

Is either the phone number or the iPhone new to your wife? (obviously if the phone NUMBER is recent to you, it was someone else's before, in most cases, and the cell phone companies don't let them "rest" very long) Did your wife buy the iPhone used? I wonder if this is somehow caused by a failure to deregister an iPhone on someone's part.
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:53 PM on June 13, 2015

Response by poster: she's had the same number for ten years or more. Phone was used thru Glyde
posted by andywolf at 8:06 PM on June 13, 2015

I'm not sure what the glitch is, but this happened to a friend of mine with iMessage.

Deregistering the phone through this link and then (re)registering it with her Apple ID seemed to fix it.
posted by builderofscience at 9:08 PM on June 13, 2015

This could be a long shot, but I've seen stranger things happen when an iPhone is synched via iTunes on a different computer. iTunes can back up all kinds of data and settings (including iMessage settings) and then restore them to the next iPhone that's plugged in, which could be months later.

If deregistering/reregistering doesn't work, changing the Apple ID password should. It'll prompt for the new password on the other iPhone, of course they won't know it, and problem solved. If that was the problem in the first place, of course.
posted by Woodroar at 10:05 PM on June 13, 2015

Wrong email adress as Apple ID. Happened everything time My mrs gets a new phone, we share an Apple store id, but she's supposed to set up the phone with her own ID. Check under messages in the settings.
posted by Iteki at 1:56 AM on June 14, 2015

This seems like a pretty major issue. Rather than fixing it just for yourself with a bandaid, I would call the Apple support hotline, tell them what's going on, and ask them "if this is happening to me, is someone else out there reading my messages?"
posted by oceanjesse at 7:24 AM on June 14, 2015

Before you do that though, please confirm that the phone was reset when you started using it. Just noticed that the phone was purchased used. When I wrote my previous answer, I was operating under the assumption that this phone was brand new, and it made me anxious!
posted by oceanjesse at 7:26 AM on June 14, 2015