Oddly Specific SMS Spam/Phishing Attempt

So this isn’t good – got a spam SMS at one in the morning. It’s a bad sign when the SMS is specific enough that it uses your name, your wife’s name and its sent to your phone number only. The action to take was a link hidden behind bit.ly URL shortening. It said “there is a new request from {wife’s name} 5 mins ago trying to connect right now” from a number 706-752-xxxx.

I’m trying to think who would have all those pieces of information (my name, my phone number, wife’s full name) and how they could be compromised. Was it a company like Amazon or some other online retailer? Could it be my employer or health care provider? Financial?

In some ways its kind of scary to think how many people have access to this information. I know better than to click on these kind of links, but it is incredibly annoying to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop (the company involved announcing they’ve been hacked) and then work on remediating whatever needs to be addressed. In the meantime, maybe I need to change my passwords again for my email and online shopping websites.

2 thoughts on “Oddly Specific SMS Spam/Phishing Attempt”

  1. Just got the same message except the name was a facebook friend (who is also in my contacts list). Interestingly, Facebook does have my cellphone number. Not sure why, though. So in my case, it’s probably either google or facebook — I’d put my money on facebook. And I wouldn’t be surprised either way if they sold that info or were hacked.

  2. This is the only post I could find that was similar to what I just received. I received a text from 681-231-xxxx that’s stated “my name, my wife’s full name had just invited me 33 seconds ago and then a link it was secretboxly.com/random letters” super creeped out by it. Did you find out any info on yours? Have you received anymore?

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