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Suspicious robocall campaign warning people to ‘stay home’ spooks voters nationwide

"The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President"

A Department of Homeland Security official said the FBI was investigating the call, which, along with new robotexts that surfaced in Michigan, prompted warnings about misinformation

VIDEO - How to spot voter intimidation and what to do if it happens to you 4:03
Some states have already seen signs of voter intimidation at early voting locations. Here’s
your guide on how to spot and avoid it. (Blair Guild, John Farrell/The Washington Post)

By Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker

November 4, 2020 at 8:44 a.m. GMT+11

A wave of suspicious robocalls and texts bombarded voters as they began to cast their ballots on Tuesday, sparking fresh concerns about the extent to which malicious actors might harness Americans’ smartphones to scare people from the polls.

Across the country, voters have 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 Tuesday said they had witnessed additional attempts to deceive their state’s voters in particular, including one robocall campaign targeting the city of Flint that inaccurately told people to vote tomorrow if they hoped to avoid long lines today.

The origins of the each of the calls and texts remain unclear, reflecting the sophisticated tactics that robocallers typically deploy in order to reach Americans en masse across a wide array of devices and services. State election officials have scrambled to reassure voters in response, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledging Tuesday to “work quickly to stamp out misinformation." The FBI also has opened an investigation into the Michigan robocalls, a Trump administration official said.

The reach and timing of the “stay home” calls similarly caught the attention of state and federal government leaders, including New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who said she had already sent subpoenas to investigate the source of the intrusion. Data prepared for The Washington Post by YouMail, a tech company that offers a robocall-blocking app for smartphones, shows that the calls have reached 280 of the country’s 317 area codes since the campaign began in the summer. The country’s top telecom carriers believe the calls are foreign in origin.

More - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocall-election-day/