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Modern Mysteries

Mystery message spooks smartphone owners

By T.K. Randall
February 21, 2020 · Comment icon 17 comments

The message unnerved many recipients. Image Credit: PD - Peakpx
Samsung Galaxy owners were left puzzled when a strange message was sent out during the night.
Thousands took to social media yesterday in an effort to find out what was behind a mysterious text message that was sent out to owners of Samsung devices in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The body of the message contained nothing but "1" with a second "1" directly beneath it.

The phenomenon seemed to be confined to devices running Android O or newer such as the Galaxy S and Z-Flip phones as well as certain models of tablet computer.
What made the message particularly unnerving was that it appeared to have been sent by the "Find my Mobile" service, leading some owners to believe that someone was trying to track them.

Fortunately however it wasn't long before Samsung shed some light on the mystery.

"This notification was confirmed as a message sent unintentionally during internal testing and there is no effect on your device," a spokesperson wrote on the Samsung UK Twitter page.

"Samsung apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused to our customers and will work to prevent similar cases from occurring in the future."

Source: BBC News | Comments (17)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #8 Posted by mktexan 4 years ago
As a software developer, I can see all too easily how this happened. It was too easy of a mistake and someone wasn't paying attention when testing push notifications and sent the message to the wrong environment. Woops, hope the person keeps their job!
Comment icon #9 Posted by and then 4 years ago
Yup... kind of like inadvertently clicking on "reply all"
Comment icon #10 Posted by Jon the frog 4 years ago
lol, that's so easy to spread mass paranoia now that everybody have a new god, their smartphone !
Comment icon #11 Posted by glorybebe 4 years ago
Neither I nor my daughter received these on our Samsungs
Comment icon #12 Posted by Eldorado 4 years ago
It wasn't just Galaxy owners affected, apparently. "Over on Twitter Samsung was claiming the alert only affected a "limited number of Galaxy devices" – yet readers using non-Galaxy phones got in touch to tell us they had received the notification. ""I'm just letting you know this message appeared on my Norwegian Samsung XCover 4," said Tomas, who had also not set up Find my Mobile. "Others reported seeing other people's personal data on Samsung's account management page when they logged in to change passwords as a security precaution. "Yet more still found details missing altogether." Full m... [More]
Comment icon #13 Posted by Dumbledore the Awesome 4 years ago
There's a Samsung account management page is there? Where's that then?
Comment icon #14 Posted by Eldorado 4 years ago
Latest: Samsung mystery notification may not have been as innocent as company first claimed "Samsung has now admitted there was a data breach but claim it only affected “a small number” of customers. "Given Samsung is the number one seller of smartphones globally, a “small number” of its users could still be a very sizeable amount. "“A technical error resulted in a small number of users being able to access the details of another user,” a Samsung spokesperson told The Register." At News dot com Australia: https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/samsung-mystery-noti... [More]
Comment icon #15 Posted by Dumbledore the Awesome 4 years ago
Well, I couldn't.  
Comment icon #16 Posted by Desertrat56 4 years ago
Why is that?  Given their history I would not waste money on any of their products.  You can buy an iPhone that will last years.
Comment icon #17 Posted by Scholar4Truth 4 years ago
This isn't the first time  cell phone users have been sent strange text  It happened this past year back in November but in that case it was a glitch  with T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cell-phones-mysterious-text-messages_n_5dc4424fe4b0d8eb3c917dcf?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJ5X6ynbml17GSr_ONWfzjSamLNWCNerlE4b2tMsxQZWNUXNtkV8LcPOm9PSlZUXXxYxn1U3BghPCeT7JEu0TfwvyuxSQHFHPdCV-Nvu66R7YpUNUG00VGjPmgV03DLKvkeTZs1z9AhXENpWr2HCbQF5BVXKAj4t2yLSbzHghSt1


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