Chelsea wants to know why she keeps receiving these cryptic text messages from 9099. The messages alternate between telling her new phantom services have been added to her account, and sending her an account PIN and security answer. We thought it was someone trying to gain access to her account, but the PIN and security answer aren’t hers, and the services never show up on her bill.

I’ve had a Sprint account for a little over three months now. The very first SMS I received was from a Sprint number, 9099. It was a notification that my “request to add service features” to my Sprint account was complete. I received two more of the same message that day. I went online to check out my selected features and everything appeared to be in order, so I went about my day.

Two days later, I received another text message from 9099, Sprint’s auto messaging number. This time the message read: “SpringFreeMsg. As requested on 20080712, your Account PIN = xxxxxx. Security Answer = xxxx.” I didn’t recognize the PIN or security answer, figured it was a fluke, and again went about my day.

I’ve since received the security information text message 7 times and the service features message 6 times. My bill continues to be correct each month with no services features added or removed, and the security information that they send me is always the same, and is always not mine.

I finally decided to call them today to figure out what was going on. Not surprisingly, they had very little to say about the situation. The CSR’s best guess was that someone was requesting their security information, and the system was redirecting it to my phone rather than theirs. She suggested that perhaps it was the person who had my phone number before me, which makes little sense to me. To the CSR’s benefit, she was very kind, but explained all this to me as if it was no big deal. I expressed to her my concern that if someone’s information was getting sent to me, my information could be sent to someone else. She said she understood, but offered nothing in the way of comfort or assurance that my information was secure.

She told me that she put a note on my account about our conversation and that if anything suspicious (I assume she meant other than the text messages) happened, to give them a call.

I’m not sure if I should/can move forward with this as I have received no negative repercussions related to the messages.

Chelsea, we’re gonna go with the CSR and say it’s probably some frustrated Sprint customer out there who can’t figure out why his/her security-related text messages aren’t coming through, and that it won’t affect your account at all. What’s troubling about that, though, is the obvious security breach of sending that info to someone else (you). Luckily, in this case you seem to be safe.

Still, you may want to keep pushing Sprint to correctly separate the two accounts, just to be on the safe side in case something big happens to the mystery account and the Sprint system decides to think that it’s yours.

(Photo: Maulleigh)

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