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.
Since then, Nasrati has called and left multiple voicemails with his employer. He says none have been returned. Walmart declined to comment on the matter.
The fallout was immediate. His phone rang nonstop with calls spewing Islamophobic slurs. Emails and texts told him to leave the country and that he better hide. Cars idled too long behind him on the road, and he found himself wondering if he was being followed. His mother and sister, shaken, refused to stay in their home, and he left with them to find another place to stay.
“I’ve always felt like an American first,” Nasrati said. “But this weekend, for the first time, I felt like an outsider in my own country.”
He raced to the police station to file reports, one against the account impersonating him for identity theft and others for defamation. There, the officers told him to report the account that had targeted him, which he says he has, along with about 200 of his friends and family.
X, in an email reviewed by Fortune, told Nasrati that the account, @joma_gc, had not violated any X rules. The account that had impersonated him, after blowing up on @joma_gc, deactivated and removed all of its information from the page.
X did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Nasrati’s case is just one amid a surge of cyber-targeting campaigns following Kirk’s assassination, with critics of the conservative activist increasingly singled out online.
Nasrati isn’t sure if he will get proper recourse from the authorities, or X, or his place of employment. All he wants Walmart to do is “clear his name” and help get him some sense of job and personal security.
“What can I do in the future to not feel this way? There really isn’t anything I did wrong,” Nasrati said. “Do I have to disappear from social media, go off the grid, just to feel safe in my own home? It’s 2025: everyone has a social media presence. The fact that there’s nothing I can do to stop this from happening again is very scary.”
