Sprint Phone Cell Phone 09 HoaxThe other night, my wife gets a phone call on her cell phone. It is from an "unknown id" and the message is in Hebrew. She knows some Hebrew and she does have friends and family in Israel, so she listened to it. The message told her to press 9 to be forwarded to some other place. She pressed 9, then got suspicious quickly after and hung up.

After she told me about it, I looked up in Google cell phone hoax 09 and found something very similar mentioned at Trend Micro. In short, by dialing 9, you may be giving the fraudster access to make long distance calls on your cell phone. You will get hit with the huge international bill and not them.

I then decided to call Sprint. I spoke with customer service who suggested she change her phone number and then talk to tech support. Tech Support thought what happened was cool, they never heard of it. But they looked at the account and saw no suspicious activity. They suggested us to do nothing, leave the number, but call the fraud department to get their thoughts. The fraud department wasn't open at that time, so we called back the next day. Fraud told me that they also don't see any crazy fraudulent activity on the account and that I don't have to do anything. I questioned that, and they said if I want to be 100%, I should take the phone to a Sprint store and reprogram it so the SID on the phone is changed. Ah, that makes sense to me - changing a phone number seemed kinda archaic to me.

So now my wife needs to go to a Sprint store and reprogram her phone.