Nothing to worry about

My father has an iPhone 4 which used to be mine and I gave to him after I upgraded to the iPhone 6. Yesterday I got a text from him saying “Can’t talk now – On my way.” This was out of the blue and he wasn’t on his way to anything. He is already very nervous of online security and has decided that someone else has access to his phone account and may be able to send texts using his credit so he is refusing to top it up. Is that possible? How can I reassure him? Jayne Bisley Were you by any chance trying to call him at the time? This message is one of the predefined responses that iOS supplies when you decline an incoming call with a text. If his phone was locked at the time, it would have been even easier to do by accident, because there is no big green Accept button – just the ‘slide to answer’ and the Message button above it. Particularly for someone unused to touchscreens, or smartphones in general, I can imagine it might be easy for them to accidentally send a text message instead of answering the call. As for reassuring him, it’s probably just a question of showing him how this feature works. No one else can use his phone to make calls or send texts remotely, but even if they could, they wouldn’t use it to send a pointless template message to you.