Three families in Washington state lived through a real-life nightmare when someone turned their cell phones into spying tools. According to ABC News, it all started when Courtney Kuykendall, a 16-year-old girl, noticed her phone was sending texts to her friends without her touching it. Soon after, the threatening phone calls began, with someone using a rough, scratchy voice to say they would hurt the family. Things got even stranger when police looked into the calls and found they were coming from the Kuykendalls’ own phones, even when the family had turned them off. This sounds like something straight out of a horror movie Courtney’s mom, Heather Kuykendall, talked about the scary messages they got. “They say you’re going to die, we hate you, we’re going to murder you,” she said. But the phone calls were just the start of their problems, as the mystery person seemed to know everything about their daily lives. What the caller knows about the families is terrifying. The Kuykendalls and two other families from Fircrest told police that whoever was doing this knew where they were at all times, what clothes they had on, and what they were doing. The person even left voice messages that had recordings of private talks the families had with each other, and one recording included a conversation with a police detective. One voice message said, “I know where you are. I know where you live. I’m going to kill you.” The families started calling the person behind this “Restricted” because that’s what showed up on their phones when the calls came through. Their phones would switch on by themselves after being turned off, and the ringing sounds would change without anyone doing anything. The calls happened day and night, with threats against their kids, their pets, and even their grandparents. Some messages sounded like kids playing around, but others were really scary. James Atkinson, someone who knows a lot about spying technology, said it really is possible to control cell phones from far away. “You can take photographs remotely, you can track the person’s position, you can figure out where the phone is,” Atkinson said. He also mentioned that most police officers don’t know much about how this kind of thing works. The phone companies didn’t seem to believe it was possible. A person who works for Sprint, Matt Sullivan, said they didn’t know of any way to do what the families described. “We are partnering with law enforcement to investigate. We’re not exactly sure what is being done to these phones,” Sullivan stated. The police in Fircrest said they were stumped by the case and couldn’t figure out who was behind it. Even after looking into it for months, they couldn’t make it stop. The police haven’t completely ruled out that the families might be making it all up, but the families say everything they reported really happened. This case shows how worried people should be about phone safety and how easy it might be for hackers to use phones for surveillance and harassment.