Sex texts on mobile phone

[pbs]

I got a hold of sunshine's pay as you go mobile phone and just had a wee check up on it. He knows that I will do this from time to time but he had left it on my chair. On looking at it there is some very inappropriate pictures of women and inappropriate texts. My boy is 12 and is quite mature for his age. What would you do/say? His phone has just gone off just now and it was from this same number. I promptly deleted it. How do I block the number? How would you deal with this? I've also deleted the inappropriate pictures. Please help. Any advice would be appreciated.

[wellwisher]

Have you called the number? Is this stuff coming from someone he knows or has he managed to sign up to some sort of pay-per-message porn service?

[pbs]

I have a feeling he's managed to sign up to some pay-per-message service but the fact that there was one message where he was asked did he want a picture and he replied and kept it has me concerned. He doesn't know that I have his phone and hasn't asked if I've seen it. There were six pics in total and 3 texts to/from the number. So its obviously a recent thing. I've no idea where on earth he would get a number like this.

[WingDad]

If the pictures seem to be of women of a legal age, then it's probably a pay-per-message thing as you suspect; but also it could be a friend who's signed up to it and is just relaying the pictures to your son.

We had something similar with my son when he was 12 as well. It was my wife who found the pictures on his phone, turned out his mate had found a porn mag and taken pictures of the magazine and sent them to him. He wasn't completely innocent though because he was actively asking for them.

Although it's disappointing, it's not necessarily surprising I would say. Lads that age actively seek stuff like this. But of course, you need to tell him to stop. We just confronted DS1 about it, told him it stops immediately and that we'd now be actively checking his phone at random times.

That was a while ago, and we did check his phone every now and then. There was nothing since.