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Adult Photos in T-Mobile Site Shock Users

The over 33.5 million customers at the nation’s fourth largest mobile carrier, T-Mobile, may be in for a bit of a surprise.  When completing the monthly ritual of logging in to the T-Mobile website to pay his bill, one customer reportedly came across a controversial sight – topless ladies.

The customer, whose name is Andrew, wrote to The Consumerist:

I have my cell phone service with T-Mobile. This past weekend, I received a e-mail from them saying that my new bill was ready to be viewed and paid for. Being the expeditious person that I am, I logged in to T-Mobile’s website, whipped out my trusty credit card, and paid my bill online that same day. In doing so, I made a mental note to print out a copy of the bill for my records on Monday morning when I got to work (where I have a printer access). A little on the anal-retentive side I’d agree with you, but whatever.

Anyways, I logged into the T-Mobile website this morning to do all of this, and attached to this e-mail is a screen shot of my profile page after I finished logging in. Notice anything odd at the bottom of the page, perhaps in the right hand side of the screen, where it says “Connect with MobileLife”? ;)

I assure you that I don’t upload pictures of topless women to my T-Mobile account, and that those pictures weren’t from my camera phone (which I don’t use, and even if I did, look at what type of phone I have! That crappy Razr couldn’t take anywhere near that sort of clarity that those shots provide.)

As more similar reports piled in it became clear that the “accidental porn” was anything but the “not common” isolated incident T-Mobile suggested it to be.  One customer, a head of the Human Resources Department, relates a story in which a coworker logged in to his T-Mobile account to resolve an issue with his phone at work and saw a similar topless picture.  He states, “No one – and I mean NO ONE – would believe me when I told them that I did not take the photo, nor did I put it there. I finally had to just drop it because the more I insisted that it wasn’t mine, the more guilty I sounded.”

Another customer says that the T-Mobile’s comes-with-porn created a bit of a sticky situation with his spouse.  He states, “I was actually sitting at the computer with my wife, looking at my bill and trying to add ring-back tones, and all of a sudden, there was a picture of some girls butt with a caption reading ‘kiss this’. WTF!!?!?? She FLIPPED! To this day, she STILL talks about it!”

While T-Mobile surely wishes this issue would just disappear, it now appears that the pornographic pictures are more widespread than previously thought and not just confined to “boobs” – indeed various responders have sent T-Mobile screenshots showing all sorts of anatomy, leaving little untouched.

What’s still unclear is exactly how and why T-Mobile is showing these pornographic pictures on its site.  T-Mobile hasn’t offered an official response yet, other than to say, “T-Mobile is looking into it and investigating the situation.”

Updated 11/5/2009
T-Mobile just sent us over this statement regarding the matter:

T-Mobile is aware of reports from a few customers who have seen inappropriate or unwanted pictures in their online “MyAlbum” section within their MyT-Mobile account. We are taking these reports seriously and actively investigating these issues.

Our initial analysis of the reports leads us to believe that pictures were likely sent to some customers’ mobile number by a third party, whether the customers knew the sender or not.  If a customer has not had picture messaging enabled on their handset, a picture sent to them may be delivered only to their online MyAlbum account.  For this reason, some customers are surprised when they see the picture for the first time in their MyT-Mobile account.

We will continue to investigate the reports but if customers would like to avoid receiving picture messages in the future they can explore using T-Mobile’s Message Blocking features which are accessed through their MyT-Mobile account online.

Home page image is of T-Mobile Headquarters.

_© 2009, DailyTech