U.N. calls for ‘immediate investigation’ into Jeff Bezos phone hack allegedly involving Saudi Crown Prince
The United Nations human rights office is calling for "immediate investigation" into claims that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman helped hack Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' phone.
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People’s jaws dropped Tuesday night after reading a report from The Guardian that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, had his phone hacked after receiving an infected video from a WhatsApp account used by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The Saudi embassy in the U.S. quickly denied the report in a post on Twitter, calling the allegation “absurd.” “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out,” it said.
On Wednesday morning, the United Nations’ human rights office made a similar plea. The office said in a statement that the situation “demands immediate investigation by US and other relevant authorities, including investigation of the continuous, multi-year, direct and personal involvement of the Crown Prince in efforts to target perceived opponents.”
Bezos and bin Salman supposedly exchanged numbers after meeting for dinner in Los Angeles during the latter’s glad-handing tour of the U.S. in 2018, according to the Financial Times, which said it viewed a forensic report on the hack of Bezos’s phone. FTI Consulting, a Washington, D.C., firm that is said to have conducted the investigation, per the FT, assigned its conclusions “medium to high confidence.” (FTI Consulting told Fortune, “We do not comment on, confirm or deny client engagements or potential engagements.”)
Apparently, the compromise of Bezos’s phone, an iPhone X, occurred shortly after a WhatsApp account used by bin Salman shared an encrypted video file with Bezos on May 1, 2018, just weeks after the in-person meeting. Dozens of gigabytes of data were subsequently siphoned from Bezos’s device, an analysis found.
This is not the first time Saudi Arabia has been implicated in phone hacking—though the incident may provide the strongest link yet to bin Salman himself. Saudi authorities have previously been accused of spying on activists and political dissidents, including Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi critic and columnist for the Bezos-owned Washington Post who was murdered by Saudi agents in Oct. 2018.
While the story does indeed seem “absurd,” as the Saudi embassy called it, that is no disqualification for truth. As one foreign government leader put it to me in a message last night: “All i can say is… WOW!!!” adding, “That is the wildest thing ever.”
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Robert Hackett
Twitter: @rhhackett
Email: robert.hackett@fortune.com