UK Leaders Tricked by Fake Trump Aide Texts

Andy Burnham, the British prime minister, sent a few text messages to a person he believed was Susie Wiles, the chief of staff for former President Donald Trump. The messages were short and harmless. When the prime minister sensed something was off, he alerted the security services.

Susie Wiles is known as one of Trump’s closest advisers and helped run his 2024 campaign. Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that senators, governors and business leaders received calls and texts from someone pretending to be her. Wiles later said her personal phone had been hacked and a federal probe began.

The mix‑up is not new for UK officials. In 2024, then‑foreign secretary David Cameron held a video call and exchanged texts with a fraudster posing as former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. Earlier, in 2018, foreign secretary Boris Johnson talked for 18 minutes on the phone with someone claiming to be Armenia’s prime minister, covering topics such as Vladimir Putin and the Skripal poisoning.

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