[Florida] Someone impersonated my co-worker in an attempt to extort me for money.

This one is gonna take a bit of explaining. I’ve blacked out the phone number, names, and location mentioned in the texts above.

I work at a very large restaurant and because of that the staff consists of over 170 different employees. Our phone numbers are all listed on our scheduling app for easy communication.

I have a co-worker I’ll call Lily. Lily and I like working together, we talk outside of work, we’ve hung out after work, stuff like that. That being said we don’t have any mutuals besides our co-workers.

So Friday night Lily and I are closing down the restaurant, we both leave around 12:30, say our goodbyes and leave. The next morning I get these strange texts from an unknown number, claiming to be Lily, and how her phone is broken and her husband dumped her and she needs $150 ASAP.

So I was able to pick up immediately that it wasn’t actually her but ya know, better safe than sorry, I started engaging back and forth with this person, trying to get them onto a phone call just so I could see if they were actually her. They decline and decline until finally they call and it’s clearly a man on the other side, and he says that he is Lily in a quiet, like monotone creepy voice, and then hangs up texting they “couldn’t keep themselves together” so at this point I just tried to ignore them and they gave up, but the whole thing was weird because they seemed to know both of us based off what they wrote.

So some time later I get ahold of Lily’s actual phone number and I tell her what happened, and she’s obviously creeped out, so we look up the phone number and Googling it we saw it belongs to a woman who runs a salon, a person who owns a pizza parlor, and…ahem, an escort advertising on an adult website so who actually owns the phone number is a mystery.

We reported it to the restaurant thinking it’s someone we work with but nothing has come to light yet so we aren’t sure if it’s an elaborate scammer…either way, stay safe. Really creepy.