Ride the Lightning

FBI Investigating Suspicious Robocalls Warning Voters to “Stay Safe and Stay Home”

November 4, 2020

As I write, we do not know the outcome of the Presidential election.

What we do know is that there were (and perhaps continue to be) efforts to interfere with the election's outcome.

As the Washington Post reported on November 3, voters received an estimated 10 million automated, spam calls in recent days telling them to "stay safe and stay home," according to experts who track the telecom industry. In Michigan, government officials on November 3^rd warned of additional attempts to deceive the state's voters, including one robocall campaign targeting the city of Flint that advised people to vote Wednesday to avoid long lines Tuesday.

The origins of the calls are unclear. The FBI is investigating the calls.

As the Post noted, "The reach and timing of the "stay home" calls caught the attention of YouMail, a tech company that offers a robocall-blocking app for smartphones, as well as some of the country's top telecom carriers, which determined from an investigation that the calls may be foreign in origin. Data prepared for The Washington Post by YouMail shows that the calls have reached 280 of the country's 317 area codes since the campaign began in the summer."

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel warned local voters about a suspicious calls and texts that sought to sow confusion about the voting process. One text said a "typographical error" meant that people who are "intending on voting for Joe Biden" instead had to select President Trump, and vice versa. The text, which Nessel's office shared with The Washington Post, attributed the information to the "Federal Berue [sic] of Investigation."

The "stay home" robocall seems to have bombarded Americans since the summer, with as much as an estimated half-million calls each day, according to data collected by YouMail. They all feature the same short, recorded message: A computerized female voice says it is a "test call" before twice encouraging people to remain inside. The robocalls came from a lot of fake or unknown numbers, and after peaking in October, appear to have affected nearly every Zip code in the United States and some other countries as well.

Whomever is behind the robocall campaign appears to have relied on additional sophisticated tactics to ensure that the companies behind the country's phone systems could not easily stop it, according to USTelecom and other robocall experts. That includes cycling through phone numbers, often using a number similar to the one owned by the person they are trying to dial, a tactic known as spoofing.

There will no doubt be postmortems on various forms of election interference. There was never any doubt that people who wanted to influence the election would use fear of COVID as a weapon.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
Email: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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