“It just seems super creepy,” Alicia Tower said as she described and showed a text she randomly received one morning. The message offered landscaping services, but it also called her by her first name and told her they had just passed by her home, providing her address as proof. “I was l ike, ‘It’s super sketch. Like, how do you know my name, my cell phone number, my address?’ So I didn’t say anything back,” she recalled. Alicia Tower reads text messages that made her and some of her neighbors feel uncomfortable. She shared the message with her friends and neighbors in a social media group she belongs to. She became more worried when she found no men in her group had received the texts, including her husband. “He looked through his messages. He hadn’t gotten anything. None of the other women said their husbands got anything. So now I’m like, ‘Are they looking at women going home in our neighborhood alone?’” Eva Velasquez, CEO of Identity Theft Resource Center, said she completely understands why people would be concerned about these texts. However, she wouldn’t worry too much. “The reality is that simple information, like your name, your phone number, and your address, it’s largely available online,” she explained. Whether that’s on the dark web or buying the information from data brokers, the best thing to do, according to Velasquez, is to ignore the message. Just delete it, and move on. “I honestly don’t know if this is a scam that is just trying to use knowing your name, address and phone number as some kind of credibility so they can get you to engage further and maybe try to get other information from you, or if it’s just a very ineffective business tactic,” Velasquez said. She added that even if you’re in the market for whatever service the person is offering, you shouldn’t mess with random texts that pop into your phone — regardless if they’re legitimate. “Don’t let them pick you. You pick them,” she said. “So I would go and look at places like the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Google reviews and try to find legitimate businesses where other people have had experiences that they can share and that’s going to give you that little bit of extra information so that you know you are actually dealing with a reputable business or individual.” NBC 7 Responds spoke to the person sending these texts. He identified the name of the company he supposedly represented but then rushed off the phone. We then called the company, and they assured us they had not sent any texts to anyone as a marketing strategy to get new clients. Legitimate or not, Tower said she doesn’t appreciate the message. “I’ve gotten a lot of spam texts before, but never quite like that,” she said. ...read more read less