In an especially silly yet effective publicity stunt, the British companyMobileinsurance financed a well-documented research about sexting gone wrong – and published some hilarious results. ‘Sexting’ is of course the very XXI century practice of sending sexually explicit text or photographic messages via mobile phone, which appears to be rather widespread and just as much prone to error.
The survey polled 2,179 Britons between 21 and 30, and it found out that close to 15% of them – one in seven – actually sent at least one erotic message to the wrong person. One quarter of them contained pornographic self-shots. This would be embarrassing enough, but the worst is yet to come.

In fact, the results go into excruciating details like who the messages went to. Next time you are about to send a “sext”, just remember that the probabilities are as follows:

Friend – 37%
Ex-partner – 25%
Colleague – 17%
Family member – 9%
Stranger – 7%
Other – 5%

And while you ponder who those ‘others’ might be, know that in 77% of the cases the sender claimed to be drunk and 57 times out of 100 the results were ‘regretful’. How much, you ask? Luckily for us, there is a result table for that too. The receiver reactions were in fact the following:

Acknowledged it/apologised – 44%
Ignored it/pretended it didn’t happen – 39%
Pretended it was meant to be for them – 11%
Laughed it off – 4%
Other – 2%

Yes, that ‘other’ keeps haunting me too. I guess I’ll only have to wait to know the truth, for the survey pointed out that all of us have a 19% chance to find a misplaced sext in our inbox as well.