Calls to the army by sms are FAKE

Martial law had hardly entered into force before the residents of the involved regions started to receive SMS with the invitation to visit the military registration and enlistment office.

Of course with a knowledge of the level of ingenuity and practicality of our enlistment officers as well as our police officers we could have expected that they initiated it. But it was the Ministry of Defence (to its credit) that reported such incidents to the media and stated that was fake information, and they were uninvolved in the mailout.

Moreover, even if it were a creative approach of the Ministry of Defense, such mobilization notices would still be illegal – even if martial law provides for the possibility of mobilizing the citizens, but even under these terms and conditions it does not allow “to pick up to the National Guard with SMS”, and the notices were and are the documents handed out against personal receipt. At least, so far, there are no grounds for speaking about changes to this order or the requirements for notices.

But there is one catch [it’s the conspiracy moment]. Unlike fake mailings that are taking place in the Joint Forces Operation zone “SMS calls” were not impersonal. Judging by the screenshots posted on the Facebook page of the Ministry of Defense at least the message contained the name reference. In addition, it’s obvious that it was male users targeting. In other words, there is a feeling that this mailing was done not from the “backup” of the base station of the mobile operator, which sends messages to all subscribers within the scope of this station. This is a more nuanced approach to mailing, approach with the use of personal data. However, it is too soon to talk about where they took those data (but I have a lot of trouble believing that this was a bad joke of a man who had a huge circle of friends in the Ukrainian regions bordering Russia).

Without a doubt is that jokes about GDPR and personal data protection are not what they used to be.

There are too many ways for our personal data to get to the spam mailing lists, subscriptions to useless services or to fall directly to the hands of certain intelligence agencies.

For example, keep in mind that in the Darknet it was possible to purchase, as they said, a customer base of Nova Poshta and Privatbank. Moreover, fans of Russian social networks and mailboxes share personal data with their owners and a little bit with the FSS (but that’s not for sure), not to mention the free VPN services, which (ah, what a surprise) can be an additional tool for stealing your data. Although Facebook is not holy, they recently had to disable accounts of the SocialDataHub suspected of illegally collecting user data.

As a result, this text has led me to several trivial conclusions:

• as for everything related to martial law – keep calm, check the facts, and get your notices personally.
• choose carefully how much personal data you provide, and to whom. Digital hygiene, as well as handwashing with soap, has not hurt anyone ever.