I played along with prank call by Russian comedians – Taoiseach

By Rebecca Black, PA

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has claimed he “played along” with a prank phone call by two Russian comedians posing as African diplomats.

Footage emerged this week of a video call of the incident that took place a couple of months ago, which included the Taoiseach being questioned about the war in Ukraine as well as a united Ireland.

Vovan and Lexus, noted for their prank calls to high-profile people, previously targeted a number of prime ministers and senior political figures in Europe as well as celebrities.

Mr Varadkar said he was “immediately suspicious” but “played along”, giving “careful answers” before ending the call.

He also cautioned “it is not as it appears” on their video, saying artificial intelligence was used

“There were no Russians, they used an AI image of somebody who works with the African Union,” he said.

“So what they’ve done is they’ve overdubbed it with these Russian voices, they’ve doctored it and edited, so what you’re seeing on that site is not actually what happened, so it is fake in that sense.”

Mr Varadkar said those responsible secured the video call by impersonating somebody who worked for the African Union, adding that his office has since changed their procedures in relation to calls.

“At the outset of the call, because they used the image of the person and their voice, we believed it was genuine,” he said.

“But it became very quickly very obvious that there was something afoot of course and there was something wrong.

“I ended the call, but kind of needed to play along for a little while before assuming that it was a suspect call, but I think you’ll note from my answers to the questions, I was very careful in my answers, because I was suspicious immediately, and then it became increasingly obvious through the course of the conversations that it was fake.”

The Taoiseach said they told the African Union what had happened and warned other governments.

“And as a result of that we have changed our procedures in relation to video calls,” he said.

“And it is the new world of artificial intelligence, it is actually really easy now to produce the fake image of somebody on a screen, and that fake image can have the person’s voice and mannerisms and everything.

“So in some ways now, I think one of the strange consequences of things like AI is that people are going to want to see things for themselves a bit more, people are going to be much less trusting of photographs and video and images that they see on screens and are going to want to be able to hear with their own ears and see with their own eyes.

“We have to have very strict security protocols around this for the future, which we do, but I do think in general, because of the advancements in technology, a lot more important things are going to have to happen in person that we might have thought, during the pandemic, we’re going to move to a virtual world.”