Eric Zeman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Some T-Mobile subscribers have received letters in the mail purporting to be from the carrier and accusing them of browsing “unethical” websites.
- The letters don’t appear to be part of any obvious scam, and seem to just be intended to intimidate their recipients.
- T-Mobile has strongly denied any involvement, and says it’s investigating where they came from.
Privacy can seem like an increasingly outdated concept, and while there are solutions out there for those of us who really prioritize it, many of us have become complacent towards abandoning it in the name of access to the apps, content, and services we want most. Maybe that’s exactly why the hoax we’re looking at today got as far as it did, with T-Mobile subscribers claiming to receive letters from their mobile provider accusing them of doing all sorts of scandalous things online.
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Earlier this week, Reddit user toastedsausageman shared some photos of a letter they were supposedly sent by T-Mobile, accusing them of accessing hacking and adult sites that were “ethically concerning.”
Right away, something about that felt wrong to us — and not just the idea of T-Mobile so shamelessly spying on its users and confronting them like this. From the header, to the line spacing, to the font, this just didn’t feel like official correspondence from the carrier.
Well, sure enough, it’s not! The Mobile Report managed to find more users sharing similar letters online, and reached out to T-Mobile in the hopes of figuring out what the heck was going on with them. And the carrier minced no words in its response:
We’ve looked into this and can confirm these letters are not legitimate. They did not come from T-Mobile and do not reflect our policies or practices. We do not monitor or censor browsing activities, and like other providers, we use standard protections to block access to known malicious sites for security purposes. We take this kind of impersonation seriously and are continuing to investigate. In the meantime, our Care team is following up with customers who reached out to us.
So why are multiple, seemingly unconnected T-Mobile subscribers being pranked by some unknown third party? How are they even being identified? In the absence of any clear scam being pulled off here, this really might just be a case of someone doing it for the lulz — trolling strangers for the sake of causing chaos.
As for getting addresses (these are being sent snail-mail, after all), your guess is as good as ours. Bored employee at a carrier store looking to stir up trouble? Fallout from one of the many T-Mobile data breaches that the carrier can’t seem to prevent? Share your guess down in the comments.
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