A Zoom call with the Federal Reserve was abruptly shut down on Thursday after someone joined just before its start and showed everyone porn.
According to Reuters, minutes before the start of the call, a participant with the screen name Dan “began displaying graphic, pornographic images.” Participants’ microphones and videos weren’t turned off by default by the host. There were more than 220 people on the call at the time, Reuters reported.
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“We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret,” Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the event, told Reuters. “We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us.”
The event was to feature Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller’s remarks on the economic outlook to the MBCA.
The prank, known as “Zoom bombing,” became popular during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. In March 2020, the FBI published a warning about people hijacking virtual meetings and online classes, advising hosts to make meetings private and set screen sharing options to “host only.”
In August 2020, a judge suspended a virtual bond hearing after someone bombed the video call with Pornhub videos. In August 2022, someone streamed 3D porn featuring Final Fantasy characters in front of several politicians, academics, and one Nobel Prize winner during a virtual event with the Italian senate.
A spokesperson for Zoom told Bloomberg that the videoconferencing company “takes meeting disruptions extremely seriously.”
