Execs say worked on 200 elections, including in India
LONDON: The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with former spies to swing elections around the world, according to an investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 News.
Executives from Cambridge Analytica (CA) spoke to undercover reporters from the channel about the methods used by the firm to help clients, which included hiring sex workers to seduce rival candidates and entrapping them in fake stings.
The executives, who served as US President Donald Trump’s election consultants were also secretly filmed talking about using bribes, former spies from the UK and Israel, and fake IDs. They boasted CA and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories had worked in more than 200 elections around the world, including India, Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic and Argentina.
CA’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the firm secretly campaigns in elections around the world, including operations through a web of shadowy front companies or sub-contractors, Channel 4 reported.
In one exchange, Nix said the firm could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another conversation, he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land... we’ll have the whole thing recorded... and we post it on the internet.”
CA is at the centre of a scandal over its role in harvesting more than 50 million Facebook profiles for the 2016 US presidential election — one of the social media giant’s biggest data breaches.