The first odd thing was that it was a text message, that clearly came from an email address. (In this case, gmail)
The second odd thing was that it was sent to twenty people.
The third odd thing was that it simply referenced an ip address.
Looking at the "20 people", it showed this...
Twenty consecutive phone numbers. Nothing suspicious about that, right?
I visited the ip address with a neat tool called Silo, from my friends at Authentic8. Silo can hide your ip address, as well as your country of origin, and can also isolate your computer from web-borne malware. The site was a "dating/porn site", and, although it did not seem to throw anything malicious at me, the typical m.o. with this sort of site is that every few visits, it randomly will, so it's one of those places you don't want to ever visit on an unprotected computer.
This was the first time I've received a text from an email address, but a quick bit of googling shows that lots of providers offer such a service. I guess there must be some upside to it, but to me, it just seems like an easy way for the robo callers to send malicious things in bulk.
The moral of the story, in my opinion is that if you get a text or iMessage from an email address that you don't know, don't trust it and simply delete it.
Remember, www stands for World Wild War. Stay safe, folks.
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