As if MPs didn’t have enough security threats to consider just now, a growing number of Westminster staff have raised concerns about being caught up in a phishing operation. 13 men have now come forward after receiving intimate and rather salacious messages from suspicious mobile numbers. Behind the messages, foreign affairs committee chair Alicia Kearns believes, is ‘almost certainly a foreign state’.
A Labour MP and a current government minister are among the targets, as well as a Tory backbencher, a former MP, a manager of an APPG, a former SpAd, four party staffers, two political journalists and a broadcaster. The scammers, going by the names of either ‘Charlie’ or ‘Abi’ according to Politico, took a similar approach with each victim that they contacted between October and March: first, they would reveal rather personal knowledge of their targets’ lives, then move on to what the affected government minister termed ‘flirty’ conversations — before, in some cases, even sending explicit images.
While a number of recipients blocked the fraudsters pretty quickly, not all of the targets immediately realised they were being scammed. It was only on reading Politico’s coverage that one former MP realised what had happened. ‘I had put it down to Westminster having lots of weird people who work there,’ he admitted. Good heavens.
Conservative whips had previously warned their MPs to be on the lookout for WhatsApp scams after similar incidents occurred last year, today’s Mail reports. This time around, cybersecurity experts with sight of the messages concluded that those affected were being maliciously targeted. Sir Iain Duncan-Smith, Tory backbencher and former party leader, has called for increased security for those working in Westminster and branded the attempts to contact staff ‘an assault on parliamentary democracy’. ‘We’ve been slow to protect people,’ he admitted. ‘The government and security services have got to get on with it.’
And after the mobile messaging app crashed last night, leaving users around the world — and parliamentarians around their constituencies — without access for hours, might all this signal the beginning of the end for government by WhatsApp? Don’t hold your breath…
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