Dozens of Black people across the country said they received text messages telling them they had been “selected” to pick cotton from the “closest plantation.”

The messages came just hours after the polarized presidential election ended this week.

Monèt Miller, a publicist from Atlanta, was reeling from Donald Trump’s White House win Wednesday morning when she received a text message from an unknown phone number.

“Our Executive Slaves will arrive and put you in the Brown Van,” the message said, “be prepared to be searched when you enter the plantation.”

Miller, 29, was shocked. He wondered how he got the person’s phone number and questioned whether he was being monitored. He responded in panic: “Who is this?! I will find out who he is,” and shared the photo of the article on social media. He learned that some of his friends also received the same message.

“This is a scare tactic,” Miller said in an interview. “I saw it and said: ‘What the hell is this?’ Usually, in any other situation, someone is racist enough to be funny, it’s bad humor, it’s kind of funny. But that day, with the climate and everything going on, I was really scared.”

Black social media users across the country said they received text messages similar to Miller’s. NBC News confirmed that most of the recipients were college students from a wide variety of schools across the country, including Ohio State University, Clemson University in South Carolina, the University of Southern California and Missouri State University.

Domonique Valles, 23, who attends the University of Southern California, said she and some of her Kappa Alpha Psi brothers received the text messages and have since filed a complaint with the FBI.

“I definitely feel unsafe on campus,” Valles said. While she said she doesn’t know what the campus can do to make people feel safe, “they definitely need to at least support people from this Black community who are suffering.”

In a statement, the university called the messages “hateful and unacceptable,” adding that it referred students who received them to the campus Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX.

The FBI said Thursday that it was aware of the texts, was in contact with the U.S. Department of Justice and encouraged people who received them to report the messages to local law enforcement.

Various Clemson University students reported receiving text messagesOne public declaration from school. “These numbers were determined to be associated with online fraud sites.” The statement says in part that campus police are “actively investigating the matter and working with state partners to determine the source of the messages.”

It’s unclear who is behind the mass text messages, what motivates them, or how they obtained the phone numbers of the majority of black people. But some of the anonymous numbers appear to be connected to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable, “printer” phone numbers.

A TextNow spokesperson told NBC News it was aware of the messages. “As soon as we became aware, our Trust and Security team took swift action and closed the relevant accounts within an hour,” the statement said. “TextNow is proud to be an inclusive service offering free mobile text and data to millions of Americans. “We do not tolerate or condone the use of our service to send abusive or spam messages and will work with authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future.”

The Attorney General’s Office in Virginia condemned the messages on Wednesday and directed anyone “who believes they are under threat” to contact law enforcement. Police departments and leaders in cities across the country also addressed the situation.

Young people as well as high school students and those beyond college received these messages, which began to spread the morning after election day. Some Donald Trump is mentioned in the messages.

Brian Hughes of the Trump campaign condemned the texts and said it was “complete nonsense” to associate the president with the messages.

“If we can find the source of these messages that promote this kind of ugliness in our name, we will obviously take legal action to stop it,” Hughes said in a statement to NBC News.

“President Trump has built a diverse and broad coalition of support with voters of all races and backgrounds,” he added. “The result was an overwhelming victory of his common-sense mandate for change. “This will result in a second term that is beneficial to every man and woman working in our country.”

Some recipients responded to the texts with anger, others with humor, but most agreed that the messages were a bleak prediction. The NAACP condemned the messages, saying they believed they were a product of the president-elect’s rhetoric.

“The unfortunate reality of electing a President who has historically embraced and at times encouraged hatred is unfolding before our eyes,” the statement said.

Although college students appeared to be the group most targeted by the messages, people of color of different ages reported receiving the messages. Corryn Freeman, 35, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said she and her fellow high school students received the messages. He said that if the messages were a mass spam operation, that could signal danger to recipients, with “our collective security potentially at risk.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened just one day after the Donald Trump election,” Freeman told NBC News. “I think the elections have reignited and provoked people with racist tendencies. I think this is intentional to scare black people into a reality we don’t want to return to.

Black Democrats weren’t the only recipients of the text messages. John Anthony, a Black Republican who hosts a conservative radio show in Illinois, said he received the message Wednesday afternoon and immediately dismissed it as a leftist ploy.

“They tried to make it look like it was coming from Trump or the Republicans,” Anthony said of the message, adding that he believed the message came from a “leftist organization” hoping to create racial discord. “This is the beginning of the ‘Let’s go after Trump and his supporters’ kind of thing. That’s what I take away from this.”

The Federal Communications Commission said in a statement that it was aware of the messages and was “reviewing them with federal and state law enforcement.”

A spokesperson for CTIA, the official trade association representing the wireless communications industry, told NBC News that many wireless carriers are affected by mass messaging and that the association is “pushing back against aggregators running text message campaigns like this.” beginning.”

The text messages appear to have ended as of Thursday evening, but Miller said he feared they might be just the beginning of a racially targeting attack.

“Now people are testing the limits of how far they can go by playing with people,” he said. “I definitely see this as just the beginning… I feel like in the future we’ll be attacked in person, not from behind phone screens.”

This article was first published on: NBCNews.com.