A woman tried to call her mom in Iran. A robotic voice answered the phone
A woman tried to call her mom in Iran. A robotic voice answered the phone
Some Iranians living abroad are trying to call their families back home, only to have a robotic voice answer. Sometimes it mimics a conversation.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — When Ellie, a British-Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead.
“Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asked in English: “Who is calling?” A few seconds passed.
“I can’t heard you,” the voice continued, its English imperfect. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”
Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago.
They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families.
Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted.
It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.
Only the second most terrifying story I've read today
Wow, that audio is super unsettling. On its own it would seem innocuous, but with the context of trying to contact somebody in a country that's on the verge of being nuked, it's downright horrifying.
From Venezuela living abroad, had the same output on a different situation.
Family was traveling to EU from Caracas, called directly without texting first via cell phone to get an idea of how ready they where to depart and all the anticipation for the trip and boom, seems like someone I don't know is handling the phone.
Thoughts racing on my head: we're they kidnapped, were they kidnapped? What is actually happening?
I tried to reach out using other providers and even going trough a landline, same output. A voice saying they'll get to the phone soon and calling them to come and pick up the device. Super unsettling.
Then my wife's phone rang via WhatsApp and it was them, they were there saying are ready for the trip and that all was on track unbeknownst to all the events.
So, without going into a lot of detail I think is by design from the current administration of narco dictatorship in Venezuela. A friend's and family VoiP company loyal to their leaders routing by default on their own carrier once the calls go onshore within their network.
A way to make money out of this is routing calls trough a maze of providers of their own to catch a "a quarter a minute" and spread unsettling thoughts on the general population who has family abroad.
After this we all started a group on Signal and hoped for a better way to communicate privately.
Consider getting VoIP phone numbers from a jurisdiction that's much less hostile, so you have another number available to use
The article criticized the closing of the Internet by Tehran, but the Internet is clear vulnerability that can be exploited in times of war.
More nightmare fuel from the Torment Nexus
Hello fellow lvl1 tech watcher
As someone born in Iran, trying to reach family yielded the same results. An AI voice picks up the phone and talks about hope, but not in a religious or war timed thing, more budhist zen definition of hope. It's surreal. Other than that, a discord server with almost 7k members had 20 people online (who are probably not in Iran). Communications have been almost completely been broken off.
This almost seems like a Black Mirror episode
I'll be very interested to some day figure out what the explanation for this is. It's extremely bizarre and very creepy. Also, it's crazy that Internet access can just be whisked away so easily by the government. I guess satellite is just about the only way around that.
During the invasion of Berlin in 1945, the overwhelmed German command trying to map out the Russian advance had to resort to just calling businesses or homes of people living in areas they were uncertain about.
If most people in a district did not pick up the phone, or someone did pick up and swore in Russian, they marked it on the map as invaded.
Different worlds of course, but the point is that civilian phones have intelligence value.
It could make sense as a super creepy tactical choice by Iran to deny intelligence gathering from abroad.
The more obvious choice would be to make everyone go dark, instead of setting up nationwide voice mail to pretend everyone is alive. But maybe this way they can keep everyone's communications open while also fooling most of these intelligence gathering methods (someone answered, in the right language, mark it as active).
I know a remote worker in Iran, went dark for a few days this week. Apparently they can't call the UK, no internet, ended up relaying messages via a friend in Brazil via sat phone.
This is chilling
Not sure how long they'll work, but here's the direct link to the audio from the article.
https://public.flourish.studio/uploads/2281856/4a7cec60-ca22-4eb3-9590-80874d2f9b84.wav
https://public.flourish.studio/uploads/2281856/f54efe40-97a4-428f-8019-04edd7451c82.wav
The second on is creepy as all hell