KSAZ News 10 in Arizona reports that a man found himself in the middle of a scary situation recently when his phone started receiving text messages from an unknown sender.

This wasn’t just some comical incident where someone texts a wrong number, perhaps with a hookup offer or other message that makes for great entertainment fodder on the Internet days later. This string of messages got stranger and stranger.

The man does not want to be identified because he is concerned about the dozens of messages he has gotten. As he read through them, he realized that he was being fed information regarding a police sting operation.

“After a while, I’m reading the texts and it seems these people are stealing a car, they had a site plan, they had a place to meet, a place to go, how fast to go, who’s covering each exit, I didn’t want to reply to that,” he said.

The man began to get worried and eventually called the Glendale, Arizona Police department. They told him they needed to check out what was going on and call him back. Twenty minutes later they called to confirm that he was indeed receiving mass texts that were intended for the members of the task force involved in a sting operation. They apologized, but the texts kept coming for a while.

“Well, they said possible vehicle to be stolen, so I guess it was a sting operation for stolen vehicles or something I don’t know so somehow you ended up on a mass text for an undercover sting operation is that what you’re thinking that’s it,” he said.

As the area media began to investigate the other numbers included in the mass text broadcast, they determined that the operation was not an actual sting, but rather a practice operation in place for training purposes. The police assured them that they would not use text messages in an actual sting, and that in this case the unnamed man’s phone number had been accidentally entered in their mass text broadcast.

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