Text Message Concerns
Just wanted to highlight an issue that caused a lot of concern in our family. My kiddo just got a Gabb phone for his birthday and has been connecting with our extended family via text. My sister shared a screenshot of concerning messages she received from him that contained alarming inappropriate language.
My son said he did not send the messages. I checked his phone, and the messages did not appear in his text history or trash (which can’t be permanently deleted - love that parental setting!). I also checked text logs on the account back end, which confirmed that these messages weren’t sent from my son’s phone.
This was quite a confusing tangle, because he did send/receive some (but not all) texts with family over the last few days. An unknown third party was just looped in somehow, and their responses appeared only to my son’s contacts.
I contacted customer support about this. They were very responsive and immediately offered to change his phone number. Hopefully this solves the problem.
Our older kiddo has had a Gabb phone for years, and we’ve never had an issue. Love the safety and transparency features for parents. I just couldn’t find a ton of info about this kind of issue (which seems to be fairly rare, but still possible), so wanted to post as an FYI in case anyone else runs into this. All the more reason to know your child’s contacts and encourage that village to give you a heads up if they ever get anything odd/concerning from your kiddo!
Comments
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Hello @KKimble,
Thank you for sharing this experience! Your concern is valid as this is definitely not a normal experience. It sounds like what may have happened is that your son's new phone number was potentially associated with someone's iMessage account. If the phone number had been used by someone in years past, the phone number could still be associated with their iMessage. Most numbers these days have had a previous owner at some point in the past. This would be confirmed if your sister is an iPhone user and the texts were blue (indicating it was using Apple's iMessage).
It's great to hear that you were able to contact our amazing Customer Support and quickly get a new number assigned to your device as a resolution.
Thank you for this post as it will help any future customers know to contact our Customer Support to help get this resolved!
-Reagan
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