Is This Dating Spam Or Is My Boyfriend Lying?

Just this morning, I received a concerned email from a reader. In it, she asks:

"I have a sensitive question regarding cell phone usage, as there are children in my home. Can a person get messages from one of these mobile dating things if someone doesn't sign up/or leave that particular cell number? I had one from speak-live.com which transfers into a sex website (porn pics, etc.) and I never have been on one of these in my life! My boyfriend, on the other hand, has in the past. I am afraid my boyfriend is lying to me."

My first reaction was to ask the reader for more information to clarify her situation. From what I can understand, her and her partner share a cell phone, and she's getting text messages from an adult dating site, asking her to join, sign up, or visit. I'm answering the question with this assumption in mind, and hopefully I've heard her clearly.

Therefore, to answer: what you've received is most likely spam. A quick search for speak-live.com found that they've used several Florida-based Google Voice phone numbers to spam random cell numbers with the message, "Hi I put a pic on my page on speak-live.com just sign in and check it out ;-)". Could it have come from your boyfriend's former adult dating site use? It's possible, yet more likely that your cell number got thrown into some database somewhere (similar to emailed internet dating scams), and used as the spammer came across it.

I strongly suggest focusing on a solution to this issue, instead of thinking about what your boyfriend did in the past. In this case, that might include getting the speak-live.com number blocked, having a quick discussion with your partner to let him know what's happened (and showing him this blog post), and finding the positives in the situation - such as you finding the text before the kids did.

So, dear readers, what do you think? Has your cell phone ever been spammed by an adult dating site, and you were unable to figure out how they got your number? What would you do if this was your cell phone?

_{Related: How Does Google Voice Work?, Dating Scam Reporting, Signs of a Dating Scam, Talking to Kids About Pornography, Talking To Kids About Sex.}

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