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You see a cell phone that doesn’t belong to you sitting on the sidewalk. It’s just a basic phone with just talk and text, nothing special, and it’s 3

Poll - Total Votes: 24
1. Take down the phone # and the serial # . . .
2. Leave it . . .
3. Keep it and use it . . .
4. Try to sell it . . .
5. Upon noticing that it's the same kind of phone, from the same service provider . . .
6. Don't use it or try to sell it . . .
Show Results
You can only vote on one answer.
years old. You:

1. Take down the phone # and the serial #, call the service provider and find out who the phone belongs to, and return it to its rightful owner.

2. Leave it, and hope that the rightful owner comes back for it before some thief picks it up.

3. Keep it and use it until there aren’t any minutes left (it’s a prepaid phone) or until the rightful owner deactivates it, then throw it away and find another phone to steal.

4. Try to sell it, and when no one wants to buy it because it’s 3 years old and can be bought for $19.99 at Walgreen’s, throw it into the trash or into a storm sewer.

5. Upon noticing that it’s the same kind of phone, from the same service provider, as the phone you already have, take down the serial # and phone #, and call the service provider and have them transfer the minutes from that phone to yours, telling them this is your old phone. Hey, the service provider might just be dumb enough to do it!

6. Don’t use it or try to sell it, just turn it off so it can’t be tracked down, and keep it in a secret place or throw it into a storm sewer so it will never be found, just to be mean and nasty.

If you choose option 1, bravo! 😍 You’re my hero.

If you choose option 2, you may not be a hero, but at least you’re a decent human being. Good for you. :)

If you choose any of the other options, shame on you. 😡


I tried inserting a poll, but some of the options I've listed wouldn't fit. Hmm, on second, thought, I'll just mention the options by number with the first few words in my poll. Maybe people will answer more honestly that way, if they can remain anonymous.
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TeresaRudolph71 · 51-55, F
Thanks to everyone who answered, especially to those who chose option 1 or option 2. I think I know now what happened. I had a lot of minutes on my phone, about 2000 (because I had been offered some good deals on bonus minutes in the past), and when I asked my service provider the next day how many minutes were left on it, they said zero. And that was after the phone had been turned off the whole time. Every time I or someone else called my phone, it went straight to voice mail. If it had been on, it would have rung a couple of times.

The customer service people at Tracfone were absolutely clueless about how this could have happened, but the thief must have taken the SIM card out of my phone and inserted it into another phone, so they could use the minutes. That's the only real logical explanation. Unfortunately criminals are very sophisticated these days, and they know how to get away with just about anything without getting caught.

The phone itself was cheap, just $19.99. But what I had saved on it was priceless - personal messages and pictures and short videos of family, and a picture of myself with my boyfriend. Fortunately my boyfriend still has all our text messages saved on his phone, so I can copy them off that, and the picture and video texts were sent as group texts, so I think everyone in my family should have a copy. I'll have to ask them to send them again, probably to my email this time instead. And I think I can find the contacts again that I had on that phone. So I guess I can get the most important things back. It's just an icky feeling, knowing that all of that somehow ended up in the hands of someone who couldn't have cared less about it and just threw it away like garbage.
thearhyss · 36-40, F
@TeresaRudolph71 😐 sad.... sad
TeresaRudolph71 · 51-55, F
@thearhyss Yeah, it really challenges my faith in the basic goodness of humanity.