Lots of text/voice spam after switching to Virgin Mobile

[FlyingPenguins]

A mere few days after activating my new phone on Virgin Mobile prepaid earlier this May, having ported my old number over from Fido, I've been getting occasional spam text messages. It's not the member benefits messages sent by VM themselves, either (I already called them and unsubscribed from those). They're usually the along the lines of "You've won a Walmart gift card! Go to this suspiciously suspicious link to redeem".

Now, in the last six days, I've received five calls from mysterious locations. I intentionally did not answer any of them. In the call logs, four of them say "unknown", while the latest one says 1-062-836-00. (A bit of Googling revealed that 062 is not a valid country code, and it's probably a credit card or warranty scammer.) All of them left a voicemail: two were silent, one was unintelligible though in English, one was barely listenable but said something about an appointment at a medical clinic in Florida, and the latest was in another language. The three who did speak in the voicemail message were human, and had thick foreign accents.

Any chance VM sold my number to a spam list, or is it just coincidentally bad luck that I'm getting them right after I switched to VM? This spam stuff hadn't been happening at all while I was on Fido, either. (Well, not for the last 4-5 years, anyways... but at least that was all text spam that eventually disappeared completely.) And no, I did not disclose my phone number on random sites on the internet.

[VirginMobileCan]

Hey There!


Sorry to hear that, FlyingPenguins! That's definitely not our way-- we take our member's privacy very seriously and never, ever sell or give your number out to anyone outside of us.

For any text messages that are coming in from 3rd parties, you should be able to stop them by replying with STOP. Alternatively, we could change your number up to a new number, and while that can be a pain (sorry about that!) the good news is there's absolutely no fee in doing so!

If you need any help with anything, let us know-- this kind of thing is very important to us!


Lots of Love,
Virgin Mobile