A Missouri woman says she and her family were harassed with racist text messages after Sprint accidentally assigned her phone number to another customer.
Almitra Buzan told The Kansas City Star that she and her husband visited a local Sprint store to fix a problem with her phone’s Wi-Fi connection.
After they visited the store, Buzan’s phone stopped working for several hours. But later that evening, her husband’s phone received a number of vulgar, racist messages appearing to come from her phone number.
{mosads}“Well f— that little c— Jenni I’ll make sure I whoop her little ass real good ok granny? Will that make you feel better?” the person texted, in response to a message from Almitra’s mother, who texted the couple while babysitting her grandchildren.
Sprint officials later told the Buzans that an “unsavory” looking man who visited the store after the couple was inadvertently assigned Almitra Buzan’s phone number, overriding her own service and rendering her phone unusable.
“This man sent texts that were violent and racist,” Buzan told the Star. “All of this tells me this is a really serious situation, and it makes me fear for my safety.”
Sprint has apologized to the couple and taken responsibility for the mistake, but the Buzans say the company has not made a substantial effort to remedy the situation six weeks after the incident occurred.
The couple spoke with several Sprint officials on different levels of the company, and were seeking new phones, an identity-theft protection plan and one year of paid service.
The company offered them a credit of more than $500 to pay off their current phones and to make the couple eligible for new phones, according to the Star.
“This had been such a disruption to our lives,” Buzan told the paper. “There has been an emotional scar. And even if they would have said OK six months [paid service] and identity theft protection or if they had just acted quickly, we would have been happy. But it’s been six weeks.”
She said that the situation has now entered arbitration and is being handled by Sprint’s legal team.
Lisa Belot, a Sprint spokeswoman, told the Star that she thought the company’s offer was “satisfactory.” She declined to comment further on ongoing negotiations and did not say whether any action was being taken against the man who sent the text messages.