The FBI is investigating mysterious phone calls and texts telling some Americans to “stay home” on election day.
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Michigan officials said on Tuesday that automatic messages were sent to their citizens to misinform them. Residents of the town of Flint, in particular, received information advising to go and vote on Wednesday, if they wanted to avoid the queues. However, we would never refer to elections.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration claimed that the FBI had opened an investigation into Michigan, according to reports. Washington post.
Also according to the famous daily, 10 million automatic calls telling voters to “stay home safe” have been received in recent weeks across the country.
The origin of these malicious messages is still unclear and would be a sophisticated tactic to reach large numbers of people at once.
CEO of YouMail, a company that specializes in filtering unwanted content, Alex Quilici, says this kind of automatic calling strategy can be damaging in an election environment.
“All of this shows that it can be difficult to react quickly in a campaign made up of many appeals,” he explained.
His company discovered that the calls could be from overseas and was able to attack 280 of the 317 area codes in the United States. The frequency of these would have increased during the month of October.