On Saturday night, a tweet appeared then quickly vanished on Justin Bieber’s verified Twitter account: “everyone call me 248-XXX-XXXX :) or text”. The number belonged to a teen in Detroit, and Justin apparently tweeted it out of revenge.
Saturday night around midnight, Justin tweeted this:
A few minutes later, the tweet disappeared. But not before thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of Justin’s followers retweeted it with expressions of astonishment. Was that actually Justin’s number!?The number actually belongs to a Detroit teenager named Kevin Kristopik. About 1am on Sunday morning Kristopik tweeted “Thanks for giving out my # @justinbieber.” Two hours and over 10,000 text messages later, he posted this video to YouTube of his phone blowing up with calls and texts from Bieber fans:
We called one of the numbers visible in the video, and the girl who answered confirmed she called the number at around midnight last night. “I thought it was some kind of prank number,” she said. “I didn’t think Justin Bieber would be stupid enough to post his own number.”
It’s unclear exactly what Kristopik did that caused Justin Bieber to sic the equivalent of Boston’s population on him. But it appears it was payback for Kristopik hacking the Twitter account of a childhood friend of Justin’s named Ryan Butler and using it to get Justin’s phone number. On July 27, Kristopik tweeted“im the one who hacked ryan and got justins #.” When asked him today on Twitter, “You hacked ryan, and now jb wants payback so he tweeted your number?” Kristopik repied, “Kinda.”
Of course, it’s possible that Justin’s own account account was hacked. But since last night, he’s made no mention of it and has been blithely tweeting stuff about hanging out with Kanye West all morning. We’ve been trying to reach Kristopik all afternoon, but calling his number brings up only an automated message: “The mailbox belonging to [redacted] is full and cannot accept new messages at this time.”
Defarmer
