Reselling a cell phone

[lathorpe]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Utah

My brother gave a LG dare bought through Verizon to a subsiderary of AT&T when he changed over to AT&T back in July of this year. Tonight I got a call from a store in the Cache Valley Mall. One of the employees thought they found a lost phone. They called the emergency contact on the phone which was me. My other brother's name and information and my sister's name and information were on this phone. I told them it was my brother's phone. He had a LG dare. I contacted my brother via e-mail. He told me he never lost his phone.

I called AT&T who told me they never resold phones but that they put them in a bin to be scrapped. They told me that the place my brother turned back the phone was a subsiderary (Spring Mobile).

I had called the store where they had found the phone. I was told the owner had taken care of it and to not worry. I was worried not knowing if my privacy and my family's privacy was in the hands of a stranger!

The owner of the store called me and said that he had this phone because they were thinking of buying it. He told me that there was no way to delete the contacts off the phone unless the sim card was taken out.

I called Verizon and was told that yes, the contacts should have been deleted by the store that took the phone. Verizon also told me that the LG Dare does not have a sim card.

My concern is that I have no clue how long this "boss" has had this LG dare with my information and other family's information on it.

Is there anything I can do legally to not only the store but to this "boss" who has the phone?

 

[justalayman]

Is there anything I can do legally to not only the store but to this "boss" who has the phone?

Nope. Your brother gave somebody the phone without deleting the info on the phone; shame on him. If it had a sim card, he should have kept the sim card. If it did not have a sim card, he should have manually deleted all of the info in the phone.

Unless he had some contract that the phone would be used for some specific purpose, he has absolutely no control of what happens to the phone once he turned it over.

 

[lathorpe]

Reselling of a cell phone

When I contacted the boss of the store where the cell phone was found, he told me his employee called him in error. He also said he had got the phone on a trial basis. I have never heard of a cell phone being given by any dealer on a trail basis. My brother said he was assured by the subsidiary of AT&T that his contacts would be deleted off the phone because he asked them about his contacts when he gave the phone up. The boss of the store where the phone was supposedly found gave my brother an entirely different story. We have no idea how long this "boss" has had the phone or how many other hands this phone has passed through with our brother's information on it. In fact, the phone still had his old phone number as the contact number of the phone. The "boss" turned the phone back to AT&T who in turn gave it back to my brother. This is just an extremely strange situation all the way around.