(Note: I started a thread about this on the Google product forum, but over a couple of days there have been no responses.)
For those who don’t know, Google offers a service where they give you a second phone number that you can use on your mobile. Among other things, it allows you to receive texts sent to that number, and the transcriptions of those texts will appear in your GMail inbox. This SMS-to-GMail tool figures prominently below.)
About two months ago on Facebook I friended a woman whom we’ll call Priscilla. Since then there has been the usual kind of FB and FB Messenger interactions between us, with a fairly extensive chat history using either the browser based PM utility or the FB Messenger app. AFAI can tell, FB Messenger and the browser-based tools PM and Chat are all really the same thing under different hoods and they work seamlessly together. If you use FB Messenger on your mobile while watching the FB Chat window on your notebook, anything typed you or your friend will appear instantly in the chat window, as well as on your phone.
So last Friday, P started having issues with her iPhone, telling me later that it just kicked her off, and it was out of commission until the following Monday. As a matter of fact I knew it all along, because when you open FB Messenger and see your contacts, it displays an icon for each one indicating how they access the messaging infrastructure–either browser-based or FB Messenger. In the case of P, who has had FB Messenger for a long time, “her” icon went from FB Messenger back to browser-based tools.
Fast forward to Monday, and P calls the Apple support line to get her iPhone straightened out. I haven’t gotten the details of this yet–why I care will become clear–but it seems that, among other steps, they probably walked her through a factory reset or something like that. Google sends out a standard email whenever you log into your account with a new or reset device, and P got this email, which is basically just to let you know that Google thinks the login might be from a new machine, and if it wasn’t yours you may be a cybercrime victim.
Although I didn’t see them until Tuesday morning, I got a weird SMS-to-GMail transcript of my own on Monday afternoon, and this is where the concern about phishing comes in.
I’ve blocked out the two phone numbers involved except for area code; the 910 number is my GV number. The originating number with the 205 area code doesn’t have any known connection to P or me. Also, P didn’t know my GV number or even my email address; our only point of contact has been through FB.
The above message really does not reflect P’s level of education or writing style, but it’s so odd that whoever it was used Priscilla’s name. Granted, the real name for which “Priscilla” has been substituted is a very common name for women in our age cohort (she is a couple of years older). It’s mainly because her name appeared in this message, very possibly at the same time she was on the phone with Apple that we’re concerned.
Then at 2:50am Tuesday, I got this, now from a 510 number:
And this, apparently at the same instant:
All of these SMS-to-GMail messages are apparently normal in terms of what these messages should look like, despite the fact that the addressee’s GV phone number appears in the From field.
Does this make sense to anyone here? Should we just dismiss the emails I got as random wrong-number SMS messages? I’ve never gotten these before, and I hardly ever give out my 910 number.