TMobile and the AI Nightmare

I was on my iphone speaking with my friend who lives in London. I am in the state of Washington, USA. We were speaking using the App Telegram when suddenly our call got dropped.

I immediately phoned her back, and we continued our conversation. About 20 minutes later suddenly my phone shut down. Not only did it shut down, but it sent out caller blocked messages to all my contacts.

I didnt fully realize this at the moment. My phone stopped working so I could no longer just call her back. About a half hour later I got a knock at my door.

I am an elder. (to my kids, not to me or my friends, of course). This means that as soon as my son got a random "blocked messages" notification from my phone he panicked, fearing the worst. I answered my door and there was Justin, one of my son's business partners (and a family friend). He had driven quite a distance to my apartment on Dylan's request to make sure I was ok. I assured him it was some kind of phone malfunction, and he went on his way.

Apparently my phone rebooted somehow. I immediately called Tmobile, my phone service carrier. The person on the phone informed me that because I had suddenly racked up $400 in international phone charges, they took it upon themselves to shut me off.

Understand here that as a responsible human being, I have never paid my phone bill late. I have never incurred charges I couldn't handle, and this call was supposedly free, as we were using the Telegram App.

The charge was $400, not an impossible amount to pay altho again, the call was supposed to be free. The problem apparently was that when I called her back, it was a direct dial from my phone, and didn't go through the free app as I assumed it would.

Now what had I done to trigger my phone to be shut down, and blocked message notifications to be sent to friends and family? Why was my family alerted with blocked messages notifications in the first place? My daughter in law also tried to reach me, but my phone had been shut down.

Naturally I called Tmobile customer services. After spending oh, probably a good two hours of my time going over the problem, and asking for them to drop the charges given the unintentional mistake made by an elderly person signed up for their "magenta program", I was assured they would review the charges and after four days, they would remove them from my bill.

Last I checked the charges were still there. Yesterday my phone wouldn't access wifi, and I couldn't download or even read any articles online. This too I found alarming given that my area has started flooding due to atmospheric rain fall downpours. My fear is that this hijacking of my phone caused some kind of damage. If I can't rely on it, given we are no longer allowed to have those trustworthy landlines, what am I supposed to place my faith in when there are emergencies?

What anomalous AI was the decisionmaker in this situation? How did this happen in the first place? Needless to say, I am changing my service provider. May this never happen to you.