UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham Tricked Into Texting a Fake Trump Aide

Key points

• Andy Burnham, the UK Prime Minister, exchanged text messages with a person falsely claiming to be Susie Wiles, Donald Trump's chief of staff, before growing suspicious.
• No messages of significant content were shared, and Burnham's team reported the contact to security authorities quickly once they suspected something was wrong.
• The FBI separately investigated Wiles' personal phone being hacked in May 2024, after a real attacker used her contacts list to message US senators, state governors and senior business figures.
• Former UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron fell for a nearly identical trick in 2024, texting someone pretending to be ex-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
• Downing Street has declined to comment, citing national security.

Somebody sent text messages to the British Prime Minister pretending to be one of the most powerful people in Donald Trump's White House. That is not a sophisticated cyberattack. That is a con.

Andy Burnham exchanged a small number of messages with a person claiming to be Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff and one of his closest political allies, before becoming suspicious the contact was not genuine. The incident was first reported by Politico. A government spokesperson said only: "We do not comment on national security matters."

How did this happen?

The attacker did not need to break into any computer system. They sent messages to the Prime Minister through what appears to be a standard messaging channel, banking on the name alone being enough to get a response.

Sources close to Downing Street said the messages exchanged were "of no significance" and were quickly passed to the relevant authorities once suspicion set in. No voice call took place.

The failure mode here is exactly what you would expect: a busy senior official receives a message from a recognisable name and replies before the verification question even forms. In practice, there is rarely a formal process at that level for confirming who is on the other end of a text thread.

Is Susie Wiles connected to other attacks?

Yes, and that context matters. The BBC has previously reported that the FBI investigated Wiles' personal phone being hacked in May 2024. In that case, a real attacker gained access to her contacts list and used it to message US senators, state governors and prominent business executives. Wiles herself confirmed her personal phone, not her official government device, had been targeted.

Wiles was also among individuals targeted in 2024 by a cyber espionage group, meaning a team of state-sponsored hackers, linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, a powerful branch of Iran's military.

Her name, in short, has become useful to people running impersonation operations.

This is not the first time a senior UK politician has been caught out this way. In 2024, then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron exchanged messages with someone pretending to be former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Cameron had genuinely met Poroshenko multiple times during his own time as Prime Minister, which made the deception more plausible. The Foreign Office went public with that incident specifically because they feared the attacker might try to manipulate the recorded exchange.

One thing the post-mortem will say: the attack cost almost nothing to run and required no technical skill at all.

If you work in or near government, assume that a message from a famous name you were not expecting is worth one phone call to verify before you reply.