A reader, Sarah, says her iPhone still receives phone calls even without a SIM card. She asks…

I had a ST iphone 5s. I bought a iphone 7 from them. I took the sim card out of the 5s and put it in the 7. My new phone works but sometimes my old phone works too. Even though it has no SIM card in it, it will ring when someone calls me instead of my new phone. Or my son can text on it (I gave it to him to play games on). How do I get it to stop working? Maybe because it’s connected to the same icloud account?

Hi Sarah,
I hope you are enjoying your new iPhone 7. I have the same issue all the time. All my iPhone and Apple devices start ringing when I get a call too. It’s little creepy when an iPhone without a SIM starts ringing. Turns out that this is a feature and you are correct in that it is partially related to your iCloud account.

You have a couple of options. On your iPhone 7, you can go into onSettings > Phone > Allow Calls on Other Devices. You’ll have the choice to either turn this feature off our turn it off for the the iPhone 5s. Your choice.

A better option would be to simply log the phone out of iCloud completely, reset the phone to factory settings, and set the phone up with an iCloud account of this own. That way he won’t see your text messages and other related stuff. Once you create a iCloud account for him, you can also set up Family Sharing so he can share your App Store purchases, Apple Music, iCloud Storage, and Location Sharing.

I don’t know how old your son is, but if he needs his own phone. You could also set up that iPhone 5s with an inexpensive cellular plan from tracfone or other prepaid wireless carrier. I hope this helps.