> The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.
Without reading further into the details of this case than what's given in TFA, I would go so far as to say that there probably wasn't an "offender" in any strict sense. Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert. That's what happened to me when I first got the number that I have now -- it had, from what I could piece together, belonged to a young woman from a couple towns over who had apparently up and moved halfway across the country and gotten a new number without bothering to tell anybody at all. It was an annoyance to be sure but never once did I think of blaming the callers/texters.
Forget recycled phone numbers, I get this same problem with email for a domain I bought around a year ago. Just the other day I had an email with an attached transcript for someone's recent Medrite visit. The domain I bought was at one point used for some corporate email, almost all of the emails I get for it are not business related though, it's basically all personal stuff. There needs to be a method to declare "This identifier has changed hands" for phone numbers, domains, IP addresses, street addresses, etc.
> Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert.
I've had this happen to me and really wish phone companies would wait at least 90 days before putting a disconnected number back in service. The worst part of it is I was given the option to "disable" SMS. But it turns out that doesn't actually prevent shortcode messages from going through.
I once had an internal number on a corporate system that, for some reason, was assigned to multiple desks at the same time. It took a while for us to figure out that anyone who called the number just called both of us simultaneously and only got to talk to whoever happened to answer first.
Without reading further into the details of this case than what's given in TFA, I would go so far as to say that there probably wasn't an "offender" in any strict sense. Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert. That's what happened to me when I first got the number that I have now -- it had, from what I could piece together, belonged to a young woman from a couple towns over who had apparently up and moved halfway across the country and gotten a new number without bothering to tell anybody at all. It was an annoyance to be sure but never once did I think of blaming the callers/texters.