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UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham traded messages with an impostor posing as White House chief of staff Susie Wiles before he caught on that he was being played.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Wiles has been an impersonation target before. In May 2025, someone got into her personal cellphone contacts and started reaching out to senators, governors, and business executives while claiming to be her, which triggered an FBI investigation. She was also on the target list of an Iranian cyber espionage unit tied to the Revolutionary Guards back in 2024. The FBI has since put out warnings that bad actors are running AI impersonations of top US officials, and the State Department opened its own investigation after a fake Marco Rubio reached out to three foreign ministers, a senator, and a governor.

What’s going on now: Politico first reported the exchange, citing four officials granted anonymity. It happened after Burnham moved into Downing Street. A person familiar with the exchange said that a “few messages” were traded and that they were “of no significance.” It was all text, with no phone call between the two. Burnham cut off contact and kicked it up the chain once he got suspicious. Nobody has said what was discussed, when the messages were sent, or what platform they were on.

In a statement, a UK government spokeswoman said the government would not “comment on national security matters.” Still, the UK embassy in Washington DC was alarmed enough to take the matter directly to the White House, and British officials were left wondering whether Wiles had been compromised a second time.

A White House official pushed back on that, saying “This incident had nothing to do with the Chief of Staff’s devices being hacked.”

This all comes after a run of similar hoaxes aimed at UK officials, including a 2024 exchange in which then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron took a call and traded texts with an impostor posing as former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In 2022, a hoaxer claiming to be Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal reached Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel over Microsoft Teams.