The White House chief of staff has a catfish

The West Wing meets MTV’s Catfish: The FBI is investigating a recent series of incidents involving an apparent impersonator who pretended to be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in texts and calls to her contacts, including prominent Republicans and business executives.

• In some of the messages, requests were given that were initially believed to be official—including, in one instance, asking a lawmaker to compile a list of individuals who could be pardoned by the president.
• The calls also reportedly featured a voice that sounded like Wiles, leading officials to believe AI was used to mimic the chief of staff.

The jig is up: Alarm bells started going off for some lawmakers when the impersonator began making requests for things such as cash transfers and asking questions about President Trump that Wiles should know, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people who received these messages. The texts and calls also didn’t come from her phone number.

How did it happen? Wiles claims her personal phone (not her gov’t one) was hacked. However, it would also be possible to put together a similar target list from a combination of publicly available information and data sold by gray-market brokers, Wired reports.

Maybe a good time to start using safe words…The use of AI-based voice cloning surged 442% between the first half and second half of 2024, according to CrowdStrike.