BG tech ppl, help me out please

[Dallius]

Hello,

First off thank you for reading this, it's a short tale that's causing me a bunch of unnecessary headaches.

My wife's little sister is having an issue.. someone has created a fake AIM account and has been messaging her friends saying some pretty raunchy things. They've also somehow accessed her cell phone and have been able to send text messages from her phone without physically having her phone. We called her carrier and they have said these messages have indeed come from her account, but there is no history of these messages coming from her phone (ie sent messages box).

My questions:
She has T-Mobile - is it possible someone gained access to her sim card and has been sending these messages from her sim card from another phone?

Is it possible to somehow reverse lookup an AIM account, get an IP address, and do a trace?

We are positive the situations are linked because of the nature of the messages come from each source are similar.

My opinions: She has a boyfriend who is 30 (she is 22), he strikes me as the immature type who is insecure enough to try a stunt like this to catch her "cheating" in some weird way. Without any actual evidence though she refused to believe he is the one doing it. She did confront him about it and she said his response was he started crying and swore it wasn't him (that says guilty to me).

T-mobile has been no help, they said go to the police, AOL has been less help they said they don't deal with AIM and said we should go to the aim website and email someone because they don't have any live people to help us.

Any ideas of where I should proceed with this? It's obvious to me that someone had to physically come in contact with her cell phone to achieve all of this, to gain her friends' phone numbers and such, but then again I'm only about a 6 out of 10 on the tech know how scale so I could be wrong.

Thanks a bunch for any input or advice you have,
Dallius

[hey]

go to the police

Probably not a bad idea.

[Dallius]

I have family in the police dept. they've told me there's nothing more than they can do besides file a report..

[Tajin]

Who the fuck cries at 30. Seconding call to the police. Change phone number / device and alert people that matter of the fake aim.

[Cream Soda]

This would have made a much better thread in general.

Someone move it please

[Etrigan]

T-Mo sucks my Sim card was cloned when I had them, I got a bill for over 600 bucks for going over my minutes. All that their customer service said was if my phone was I. My pocket and dialed two 2s or seven 2s and hits send that still uses my minutes.

Long story short go to Sprint or Verizon. Don't torture yourself with AT&T.

Regarding the AIM issue there are ways of getting someone's IP address but the easier thing would be for her to change her password again, and have any of her friends that get the message report the offending account as spam or the like. Just remember mitigation is easier than retaliation.

[Dallius]

I appreciate everyone's advice, and apologize if i put this in the wrong forum section, if so please move it to the appropriate one. I personally have Sprint, I can't stand t-mobile.. the whole getting the IP address was more just for proof as who it is, not looking for retaliation at all.

Whoever is doing the instant messaging created an account in her name just for this purpose, so it's not a matter of changing passwords, she doesn't even own that account where this person is posing as her.