Fake White House Chief of Staff: Feds Investigate Impersonation Attempt

So, get this, the feds in the U.S. are checking out this situation where someone tried to act like Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff. Turns out, Susie told some folks she knows that some of her phone contacts got messed with. This apparently let the fake Susie get their private phone numbers. Pretty wild, huh?

The story says this whole mess happened on her personal phone, not the one she uses for government stuff, which is probably a relief, maybe? Over the last few weeks, according to people who know about these messages, senators, governors, big-shot U.S. business people, and other important folks got messages and calls from someone pretending to be Susie Wiles. Idk, it just sounds kinda sketchy.

The White House and the FBI didn't say anything right away when asked about it. The White House has actually had some issues with keeping information safe lately. For example, Reuters reported recently that a hacker who got into the messages of Mike Waltz, who used to be the national security advisor for Trump, snagged messages from a bunch of American officials. And late last year, a White House official mentioned that the U.S. thinks China, in this big cyber spy thing called Salt Typhoon, secretly recorded phone calls from some really important American political people. Yikes.

Since Susie Wiles is a really important person for Trump and basically helps run things at the White House, anything on her personal phone would be super interesting to other countries' spy agencies and other folks who might not like the U.S. It sounds like hackers have gone after Susie at least once before too. That was during the last few months of Trump's 2024 campaign. At that time, hackers that U.S. authorities say were working for Iran went to journalists and someone working in politics with messages that were sent to and from Susie, and some of those ended up getting published. It makes you wonder, how safe is your own data, tbh?