When his phone buzzed with an unknown caller late Friday afternoon, 30-year-old Ali Nasrati didn’t think much of it. Spam calls were common. But this caller left him a voicemail: “ Did you get fired yet? ”

Nasrati disregarded that voicemail as a practical joke, or some sort of scam.

“Being the person that I am, I don’t really get bothered by these kinds of things,” he told Fortune.

But then, the texts came. From multiple different unknown numbers, they spelled out his name, his mother’s name, and his home address, followed by a chilling message: “ we’re on our way.” Random phone calls came that loudly and “vulgarly” insulted Nasrati and his Islamic faith.

Nasrati, shaken, drove home from his work as an IT specialist at the Virginia Walmart he had worked at since he was 25. On t

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