At the risk of being insultingly obvious (and apologies if this is), have you spoken to ATT? It's their database that associates a SIM ID to a phone number, so their systems should be able to tell you what is going on (at least if you get to speak to someone who knows what they are doing).

 

Sorry, I didn't think you were being rude, I was apologising in advance in case my question was so obvious that it was insulting. The trouble is that we only know what you tell us, and sometimes people do overlook the obvious.

But maybe if you explain more clearly what is going on? Your first post sounded like you had 2 phones which were both responding to the same number. This second is more confusing though, as it's not clear what Verizon, TracFone or whatever would have to do with it. Nor is it clear what the IMEI would have to do with anything (the phone number is associated to the SIM, IMEI is irrelevant). So I feel less sure I know what's going on now than I did after the first post.

But if they have somehow associated the same number to 2 SIMs there is nothing you can do. That is entirely a matter for their system, and if they don't know what's wrong that doesn't change the fact that the problem is at their end. I did consider whether some call forwarding was set up, but then only the phone it was forwarded to would ring (in fact that would have the opposite result: two different numbers would go to the same phone). IMEI cloning can happen through criminal activity, but that's nothing to do with the phone number, so that's not what this sounds like. And that's all I can think of. Maybe changing service providers would be the answer (or changing numbers, but that's inconvenient as many people need to be told).

 

Someone posted yesterday, they're having a very similar problem with AT&T. Of course I can't help you with that.

Maybe you should switch carrier if they can't give you a satisfactory resolution to the problem?

 

1. Power your TW phone OFF.
2. Cycle power on your ATT phone.
If this doesn't help
3. Search for the latest APN settings for your current carrier and apply them.

 

Hmm, I'm always a little wary where CDMA networks like Verizon are involved, because we don't have those here (I'm European) and they work a bit differently.

The messages are SMS, and not some other protocol (WhatsApp/Signal/whatever other app)? Just checking as those work differently again. Assuming SMS it sounds like some message routing has not been updated, and the fact that it still goes to the Total Wireless phone makes me suspect the issue is at there end rather than ATT's (because if the problem were in ATT's system I'd expect them to pass the message to Total Wireless, but it would be Total Wireless' system that would then pass it on to your old phone/SIM, which implies to me that they still have an association of that number to your old phone or SIM somewhere). But as noted above I'm not au fait with how SMS works on non-GSM networks so beyond the instinctive feeling that there must be something like this going on I'm not confident I can say much about how it could happen.

I assume that this affects messages sent from all networks and not just Total Wireless? If so that would give some clues, but again I'm less certain of how number portability works with the more mixed telecoms systems you have over there.