Unsolicited Confirmation Code Text Messages
April 6, 2015 4:38 PM   Subscribe

In the past week, I've received multiple unsolicited confirmation/verification code text messages from Facebook and Google, and a welcome text from Wells Fargo Text Banking. What gives?

I'm not super tech-savvy, but here's some additional info that may be helpful:
-I have one Facebook account and two Gmail accounts
-I do not bank with Well Fargo in the traditional sense, but I did receive a loan from them two years ago that is in forbearance
-As far as I can tell from looking at the security pages on my Facebook and Google accounts, the only devices accessing my accounts have been my laptop and cell phone
-I do not have 2-step verification enabled on my google accounts
-The phone numbers the texts are coming from check out as being actually from those companies when I google the numbers (Facebook is 326-65, Google is 224-444, and Wells Fargo is 935-57)

What can I do to prevent further troubles? Should I change my passwords for my accounts, or is that the goal of these apparent phishing attempts (though that's probably the wrong term for this)?
posted by kalanchoe to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Is it possible these are all honest mistakes from the same person who has been entering your phone number which is close to their own by accident?
posted by jeather at 4:42 PM on April 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Could these "phishing attempts" just be someone who is confused and mistakenly listed your phone number on their own accounts to these services instead of theirs?
posted by radwolf76 at 4:43 PM on April 6, 2015


Response by poster: I hope these represent mistakenly-entered phone numbers! I hadn't considered that. They've occurred over several days, so you would think if it were a mistake, they wouldn't keep making it over and over again, but who knows?
posted by kalanchoe at 5:02 PM on April 6, 2015


Is your phone number new? Perhaps you got someone's expired number, one that happens to be the authentication method for all of these accounts.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:55 PM on April 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: 1. Get a copy of your credit report just to make sure no one has opened lines of credit or accounts in your name as a result of ID theft.

2. Call your cell provider and make sure that no one has requested that calls / text to your phone be forwarded to another number (this is sometimes done by thieves for wire/bank fraud.)

Unlikely, but worth looking into when something phishy happens. Also, just as a matter of personal security, enable 2 factor authentication whenever you can - especially for email and banking accounts.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:27 PM on April 6, 2015


Yeah, my guess is that someone recently decided to "get serious" about their security and set up two-factor auth on a bunch of accounts, and copied and pasted the wrong phone number into a bunch of forms. Sucks to be them, if so, because they can't sign into any of their accounts now...
posted by town of cats at 10:25 PM on April 6, 2015


Response by poster: I've have the number for over ten years, and it was my dad's cell phone number prior to that. Thanks for the help, everyone!
posted by kalanchoe at 1:15 PM on April 8, 2015


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