Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Someone is mailing T-Mobile US customers fake notices shaming their online activity Summary Over the past few days several T-Mobile customers on Reddit and Discord have reported receiving physical print letters ostensibly from T-Mobile which shame them for technically legal but immoral online conduct including hobby hacking and niche adult content with objectionable characters. The letters look legitimate, and don't carry any of the normal signs of phishing or social engineering, but they are not from T-Mobile and we don't know who sent them or why.     Quotes Quote At a cursory glance, this could all seem legitimate. The letter has the official T-Mobile logo at the top, and even finishes by saying to email an official T-Mobile email account. Nevertheless, it’s all fake.   My thoughts The whole situation is bizarre. T-Mobile claims they didn't send these letters. While it's possible the PR team and legal team don't know what each other are doing, some of the verbiage doesn't quite add up. Particularly around net neutrality, both not allowing T-Mobile to punish technically legal conduct, but also allowing T-Mobile to block sites they don't like. That's not how net neutrality works. And a legal department would know that.    At the same time, it isn't clear what the point of these letters would be if they were not sent by T-Mobile. My personal hypothesis is that a small group of people have used one of T-Mobile's many data leaks over the past years to get a list of customers and sent these out in the hopes of drawing attention to some kind of cause.    Something like, even though T-Mobile is not doing this today, they or any other ISP could add any time. We've already seen the Steam situation where payment processors bullied Steam into delisting certain adult games. Theoretically, what is to stop your ISP from morally policing your online conduct?    Some version of, if you don't speak up when they go after the hobbyist hackers and most repugnant of the legal perverts (fictional characters), just because you're not a hacker or attracted to fictional minors, that will only lead to more categories of things being attacked until eventually you are impacted as well.    That's just my theory though. It costs money to send these letters to people. And too many users, both established users and people joining platforms just ask this question, have posted letters for it to just be one person trying to make a stir. And T-Mobile acknowledges multiple customers have contacted them prior to this publication to inquire about those letters. So physical letters are being sent to customers, but why? There is no monetary gain when the included email address is a legitimate T-Mobile address.    Tha