More than 50,000 people in South Austin received a shelter in place alert on Wednesday as a “dangerous and violent” person with outstanding warrants was at large. But the alert didn’t look like others sent by local agencies in the past, and many residents assumed it was a scam text.
Chris Bataska got the alert while he was at his office on Barton Springs Road.
“We’ve had a lot of phishing attempts at the company so my first thought was to email it to IT because it looked like a different link than normal,” he said. “It just created some skepticism.”…