[ThePowerOfFuet]

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/rxtl22/w...

OP followed up with:

>I actually realized what happened and I didn't want to keep it up and misinform other users or cause more damage to Google or Whatsapp.

>So what happened is I actually used a temporary phone given to me by a repair service prior to buying this phone, due to mine being repaired by said service. The service was handing that phone to anyone who needed one while their phone was in service, like I did and thus was used by dozens of people in the past years, and so had thousands of photos on it. When I used it, whatsapp backed all that data into my drive. So... When I bought a new phone, and restored the backup to it, what essentially happened was all that data from the service phone was transfered onto the new one. That's how I ended up with loads of random people's data.

>So in fact the fault was the fact that the service wasn't deleting data on the phone before handing it over to other clients.

[aordano]

Beyond this particular case, it happened something similar to me and other people i know (using burner chips, mainly); after a while of not paying the bill/adding credit to your line, the companies here cut the service and repurpose the number to sell again to a new person. This process, though, does not disable WhatsApp nor its backups if you already had a session open, so when you download WhatsApp to create your account with your "brand new" number, it instead logins to the account created before.

Then, it autodownloads all the data, keep chatting with their contacts, and everything you would normally do when you migrate an existing account to a new phone.

I fathom this is responsibility of the telcos that reuse the numbers, but it seems is already an established practice and apparently there is no procedure to disclose to most common services that the number is dead.

I thought something like that was going on, and even more reasons to move on from SMS/phone auth.