Unknown identities

Isiah, 林老师, Tina Stokes, 陈老师 and more

I pseudo gave up my US phone number a couple of years ago when I completed my studies. I went from AT&T (prepaid) to T-mobile (prepaid) to Google Fi (yes it still exists) before finally porting it to Google Voice for good.

It was pretty pricey (~$50usd back in the day) but in 2015/2016 having international data coverage + rollover data felt like the future

In the past 8 years of just passively monitoring my SMS inbox for this US phone number, I’ve seen numerous identities passed through:

• Someone looking for an arranged date
• Various political messages
• Requests for piano messages
• (Scam) CITI passcodes

None of them were a name I recognize.

The various messages received over the years

When people give up their numbers, usually we abandon the number for good.

Peaking into an old number (that I still use as a spam inbox) seemed odd but also made me wonder what sort of lives did these people lead, if they were even actual lives at all. Or were they just some sort of spam identities that bots created since my number could have very well leaked in any of the millions of cyber attacks to date.

This is most definitely a scam