#PRANK CALL ONLINE VERIFICATION#

In a message posted online, they called on Russians to share any more government or military phone numbers they may have, but ask that those supplying them share verification where possible so they can avoid harassing civilians. But they also admit they didn't do much actual testing of the numbers for fear of alerting their targets to the project too early, which would lead to their calls being blocked. For the cell phone numbers they're including, for instance, they're only using numbers leaked in recent months, since cell phone numbers are often recycled from one user to the next. WasteRussianTime.today's creators say they took care to screen the numbers they included to make sure they're all government or military staff, rather than random Russian civilians. Now, by combing through that pile of leaked information, scraping phone numbers from emails, and combining the results with those found in other public sources, the creators of WasteRussianTime.today say they've assembled more than 5,000 Russian government phone numbers, both landlines and cell phones, including members of the Russian military police, staff of its parliament, known as the Duma, and even Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB-all of which are now targets of its automated robo-dialing campaign. The Ukrainian government itself at one point released a list of what it said were the names and contact details of 620 Russian intelligence agents. Since Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, hacktivists working independently and even rallied by the Ukrainian government have carried out an unprecedented campaign of hacking operations targeting Russian organizations, some of which have resulted in the theft and leak of hundreds of gigabytes of Russians' emails and other private information. Petersburg, within the power circle of Putin, and that’s who we want to annoy and disturb.” The group of artists, activists, and coders behind the site is, according to Shera, called the Obfuscated Dreams of Scheherazade. “We’re hoping for confusion, that they get annoyed, and that these might even be interesting calls to listen to for people who speak Russian,” says one of the site's creators who goes by the name Shera. Visit the site, click a button, and it will cycle through a leaked list of Russian government, military, and intelligence phone numbers to connect two random Russian officials-and allow the site's visitor to silently listen in as those officials waste their time trying to figure out why they're speaking to each other and who initiated the call. Today, a group of international hacktivists launched a website, WasteRussianTime.today, designed to combine prank calling and robocalling into an automated weapon of telephonic annoyance targeted at the Russian state. But perhaps they can, at least, be repurposed to strike a very small and slightly absurd blow against the Russian government's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Robocalls have become a modern scourge, the destroyer of focus, the nuisance that somehow cannot be eradicated.

Prank call online