[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] Esoteric68:
Why does Monday seem to get here so quickly? *yawns*

After the hellacious weekend spent at work I was up most of the night trying to find out how someone in New York managed to get their info into my SGSIII.

Long story short (sorta), Early am on the 15th I decided to try out the GNex, so I activated it on my account thereby de-activating the SGSIII. I used the GNex for the day and decided last night that I wanted to switch back to the SGSIII. So within a 24hr period I had de-activated the SGSIII and now wanted to re-activate it.

Went to Sprint online and typed in the DEC number to do the activation, got the message the phone was already activated. I knew that couldn't be right so I tried again, same message. Then I thought maybe since it hadn't been a full 24hours the phone was still attached to my account and I could just do an update to PRL/Profile to re-activate it. Seems logical, yeah? So I do this and sure enough am able to make a call, but I had noticed the minute the phone was active several voice messages (less than 3 seconds each) from a number I wasn't familiar with, popped up on my screen.

So I check the about phone/status information and find someone else's phone number and email in my phone! A quick google tells me the number is a New York City area code/exchange. So now I'm completely confused and can't understand how this could've happened when the phone had never left my possession.

One of this person's friends called the phone and I answered, explained to her I was in Alabama and somehow her buddy's information ended up in my phone, told her if she had another way to contact him to let him know I'd be calling Sprint fraud department this morning.

Posted a message on the SGSIII forum about it and someone mentioned a possible insurance scam using repair meid and suggested I act on it immediately. I call Sprint and get the message office is closed, so I take another route to get a person on the line and explain to her what has happened and what my concern is. She looks at a few things and then says, please hold I'm going to get my manager on the line. An hour late I'm still on hold, hang up and call back to find they went home while I was on hold. (Not a happy camper)

So I wake up this morning and call Sprint at 7am, explain again what happened and they give me the fraud department number but I can't call them for another hour, now mind you I've had minimal sleep all weekend so I'm wiped out. At 8 I call the fraud department, go through the entire spiel again and the guy tells me it doesn't look like a fraud attempt.

(copied over from SGSIII forum, too tired to re-type it all)

According to him the person whose information ended up in my phone had been having trouble with their phone for the past few days, so a Sprint customer rep tried to do a three way swap using a dummy EIN, well guess what dummy he grabbed the EIN from? Yeah, that would be me.

It seems when they are attempting this procedure they just randomly start swapping the last few digits of EINs associated with the same model of phone, in this case the SGSIII, to find one available for use and just happened to land on my number. Now I don't understand the reasons for this procedure, but it sure seems like a major screw up on Sprint's part.

Now magically between 1:40am cst this morning when I spoke to a friend of the person whose information ended up in my phone (she just so happened to call the number last night when I turned the phone on) and told them I'd be calling Sprint's fraud department first thing this morning and 8am when I talked to the fraud department, the EIN had been released, so I don't believe this was an accidental EIN grab at all.

Now I'm wondering if my other two currently de-activated phones are at risk of having their EINs hi-jacked and how to prevent it. I'm not a novice at this, I always keep a de-activated device around as my insurance plan in case I lose or break my current phone. I've never had this happen before and I am not impressed.

So after a fretful night with little sleep the problem has been resolved and the phone is re-activated on my account.