my team received a suspicious text — and we wonder if our boss sent it as a way to secretly gain info

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

This one’s weird. I would love your thoughts, if you can.

Some of my coworkers and I got a text from an unknown number addressing us by our first names and asking us to rate the company we work at. It was different than the usual company survey text in that it wanted a direct response rather than following an outside link, and it came from what looked like a personal phone number rather than the five-digit number the company will use. The whole thing seemed suspicious, especially since we all just completed the monthly multiple question survey the week before.

My coworker looked up the number in the white pages and found it belonged to some lady we’d never heard of. I tried looking further to see if I could find her name associated with the company but have had no luck. I thought about bringing it to our manager’s attention, but we are suspicious it may have something to do with her.

For some context, my manager, Lucy, is a bit of a martyr. We constantly hear about her conflicts with her own boss and fellow managers, how HR ignores her, her family drama, how much of a loser she is (her words), and why doesn’t anybody come talk to her with her open-door policy? One time we had a new relief worker call out at the last minute (things happen, right?), and Lucy’s immediate reaction was to suggest it was done just to spite her, as if it was a personal vendetta against her. At the beginning, I felt sorry for her; now I’m just tired of hearing it and disturbed that she even shares some of these things with us.

Lucy’s always telling us how bad corporate says we are but that she sticks up for us and puts her own job at risk, so she can fix everything. I keep telling myself she means well. Maybe she does, but the words and gestures just feel hollow now, especially when you know she complains about people behind their backs and uses emotional manipulation tactics.

Not surprisingly, over half our staff has quit without replacements, in part because of Lucy, and in part likely because of the growing bad reputation circulating the company (a story worthy of another letter). Odd that no one wants to apply to work here.

Getting back to the text, Lucy obsesses over these surveys (likely due to pressure from above), but with her track record, none of us would be surprised if she was enlisting someone to help her ferret out info regarding who said what. The other day she asked me not to talk to her boss about any concerns I had with the way things were operating, as if I’m supposed to lie when asked a question. This was because Lucy’s boss cornered my coworker one day, and when asked a question, my coworker answered honestly while trying to be fair with the response. Lucy later got defensive and started telling everyone how my coworker threw her under the bus, acting like she was joking, but she clearly wasn’t.

Obviously, none of this is any sort of proof of Lucy being connected to the text, and we can’t just accuse her, so we all have decided to ignore the texts for now, but I wonder if it would be worth reaching out to someone to ask about the legitimacy of them. I suppose it could be a spam thing, but why would spam ask us to text back a number between 1 and 10 to rate the company?

If this is indeed an illegitimate survey being sent to employees, the company should know, right? If so, whose attention should I bring it to? Would this still be an HR issue? Oh, and then there’s Lucy. I can already picture her being upset that I didn’t tell her about the text first, which I guess makes her problem number two, or rather the main problem. I really try to ignore her drama and keep things professional, but she’s exhausting. Thoughts?

For starters, yeah, definitely don’t respond to the text!

And you might as well check with HR. It would be perfectly reasonable to say to someone in HR, “My team all got texts asking us to rate the company but it didn’t look like company texts normally do and it came from a different number than usual. I wanted to check if this is legitimately from the company, or if it might be a phishing attempt or something else I should report.” And forward a screenshot of the text to them so they can see it.

I don’t know that anything will come of it — if it’s not from them, they might just write it off as spam and not investigate. But hopefully you’ll at least get a clear answer about whether it was from the company or not.

If Lucy hears you asked HR about it and is upset that you didn’t talk to her first, don’t get drawn into any drama or intrigue. Just say, “Oh, I just figured it was an HR thing if someone is spamming employees.” (Say this in a slightly bored, uninvested tone, like this is all incredibly unremarkable and not anything you’re spending any time thinking about — i.e., the opposite of a “we all suspect you’re behind this” vibe.)

Obviously, though, your Lucy problem goes way behind the question of this one text. Realistically, there might be nothing you can do about that … but it’s worth considering whether you can fill in anyone above her on the problems with her management, and in particular on the fact that she asked you not to talk honestly with her boss. (If I were her boss, I’d be very, very interested in hearing that. Whether or not her boss is depends on what that person is like as a manager, but the whole “cornered your coworker and asked a question that she answered honestly, which then set off Lucy” thing suggests that that person might be open to hearing more.)