The text is just your name and a question mark. That is the entire attack.

Sarah? That is the whole message. No link to click, no overdue payment, no parcel waiting at a depot, nothing your spam filter would recognise as suspicious. Just your first name, a question mark, and a number you do not know.

Malwarebytes wrote this up on 13 October, and the mechanics are worth understanding because they run against instinct. Seeing your own name feels like evidence that the sender knows you, so the natural response is "Who's this?" or "Sorry, wrong number." Either one is a win. Your name and mobile number sitting together in a breached database is not a relationship, it is a line item, and the pair gets traded constantly. What the scammer does not know is whether the number still belongs to a real person who reads their texts. Your reply answers that, and it moves your number onto a more expensive list.

Some of these are pure list cleaning. Others are the opening move in something slower. The wrong number exchange becomes a polite conversation, the polite conversation becomes a friendly one over several weeks, and eventually there is an investment opportunity. The FBI has documented that pattern at length, and it is where the serious money goes.

So do not reply, not even to correct them. Do not send STOP, which confirms the same thing. Block the number and report it as junk in your messaging app, and if you are in the US you can forward it to 7726. The PC version of this usually arrives as a browser notification or a page that will not close, insisting something is wrong with your computer. If one of those has already rearranged your browser, Tendvane's browser hijacked wizard puts the settings back where they were.