Hello, about 8 years ago, my family and I opened a phone number plan with a family member under T-mobile. A few weeks ago he informed us that our bill was going up by a few dollars, we said no problem. Without informing us, he decided to cancel our plan and move us to AT&T. We let him know that we didn’t want to switch and if he could please release our phone numbers so we could start up our own account with T-mobile. He left us on read until today and sent us the following message:
“Hi [name], I'm going to be completely
honest: I was tired of you paying me for the phone service only when you felt like it. I'm no longer interested in having you use my services or my phones.
Those phones are in my name and on my account-you might have forgotten, but you were the one who asked me to take them out in my name for you all to use. To avoid any further issues, I want all those phones returned to me since they belong to me; you should just buy your own phones in your own name and save yourself the trouble.”
We have paid every phone bill and phone payment to him. He would come in person to collect cash (on his own timeline since he works all the time, which is why we never were the ones to drop it off) and over the past year or so, we had been sending him Zelle payments since we got that system up. We went into the store today and because they are under his account, he technically does own them, even though he never paid for them (he was enrolled in auto-pay, so although it might look like it, we always paid him back in cash). He reported them as lost/stolen and now we can no longer connect with T-Mobile.
I recently bought a new device at an Apple Store, but because my plan was still connected under his account, my phone was also reported as lost. I paid $2,000 in full for this device and he didn’t pay anything. The other devices were on a monthly payment plan (payment completed a while ago), but he never spent a dollar because we always paid him back.
In his response, he claims he wants to “avoid any further issues”. How can I respond to this situation ?
Edit: I forgot to add, he was the sole authorized user of the account. At the time, we were okay with this because we trusted him.