Reply All - #138 The Great Momo Panic

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

We investigate the mystery of why parents across the world became convinced that a half-bird/half-woman monster was going to harm their kids over the internet. And we answer the question of how robocallers are able to fake your telephone number when they call you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Repai-all. I'm PJ Vote. Live from the news station. This is 7 News at 7. A highly disturbing internet challenge is daring children to do dangerous things, including attempting suicide. This is called the Momo challenge. So if you're not a parent with small children, it's possible that you haven't heard of Momo. In that case, what you need to know is that she is a new internet boogeyman, and she is scaring parents everywhere. This terrifying face is circulating the web.

This is Momo with bulging eyes, a chilling smile, and jet black hair on a bird's body. This creature, Momo is supposedly killing children over the internet. In one version of the story, Momo messages your kid, gets them to do an escalating series of dares, and in the final one, she tells them to commit suicide. In the other, Momo just tells your kid to commit suicide after suddenly appearing in the middle of an otherwise normal YouTube video. The Palm Beach County School District is taking action to keep your kids. kids safe, they're temporarily blocking YouTube after the Momo challenge is causing big concern. So the good news is that very little of the story seems to actually be true.

The image of the person who's supposed to be called Momo is actually the snapshot of a random Japanese special effects sculpture called Motherbird. And the idea that Momo has appeared in videos telling kids to kill themselves, or even that any kids have died or been harmed, there's no actual evidence of this. But that part of the story, the lack of evidence, tends to get very underplayed in all the terrifying news coverage of Momo. You or someone close to you may have had the misfortune to encounter this charmless character online in recent days. It's apparently known as Momo.

That is the BBC. The BBC. And it's not just them. Here in Canada, police in Ontario and Quebec have also issued warnings about it in the past. And this is the Mo Mo Mo Mo Mo Challenge. The Diffy Momo Challenge. For months, it just felt like the Momo story was impossible to ignore. Unless you were me, I did just ignore it.

Because to me, it was just like, oh, this is a thing that parents of young kids have convinced themselves over. They're very scared. They used to be scared of things like satanic death metal. This is going to pass too. The thing is, though, it hasn't passed. And this week, I decided I wanted to know why. And so I called up Katie Natopoulos. She's a reporter for BuzzFeed News.

She is also just an expert on every weird hoax on the internet. From my perspective, the Momo challenge has spread in a wild way. I have not seen any other type of misinformation spread so rapidly. Really? And so wide and like to such a broad swath of people. I think that that's what's sort of unique about it. Like Kim Kardashian is Instagramming about it. Kim Kardashian shared the Momo thing?

Yeah. I thought Katie would tell me that she found Momo ridiculous, the same way I did. But she didn't. Katie's a mom. She has a two-year-old. And she told me, the reason these parents were so scared, it wasn't because they were naive. It was because they'd seen some shit. They had spent time on a part of the Internet that is dark and seedy.

YouTube for kids. So you might have already heard this. It's called Baby Shark. It is the big viral hit of kids YouTube lately. It's fine. It's harmless. It is also very popular. It has over 2.4 billion views.

It has its own R&B remix. I'm the baby That's my mommy That's my daddy Yeah, I think Baby Shark Yeah I think Baby Shark like sort of I mean it was just weirdly

Like wildly popular And it was the kind of like earworm that like You know I have to say it's kind of catchy So the thing I didn't know is that apparently on kids YouTube Baby Shark is actually pretty highbrow Like top tier stuff. Katie said once you move away from there, very quickly you end up in parts of kids to YouTube that are just way junkier and way stranger.

There's this whole section where it almost feels like you tried to take your family on a vacation to Disneyland. You took a wrong turn and you ended up at this weird, counterfeit amusement park that's right next door. So for instance, a lot of videos that look like this one. where there's an adult man dressed in an off-brand Spider-Man costume, and he's playing house in a sort of creepy way with an adult woman dressed as Elsa from Frozen. Except unlike in the movie, this Elsa is pregnant and giving birth. There's other videos like this where the Spider-Man would actually inject Elsa

with some mysterious liquid. Apparently kids liked this, adults found it really creepy. Those have kind of gone away. I think YouTube kind of cracked down on them because they're like kind of too messed up. And now there's a lot of those that still exist in like sort of CGI animation. Spider-Man and Elsa and The Incredible Hulk and Mickey Mouse

will be like driving dump trucks and learning about colors. Just set to music and like they just drive a dump truck through a giant bucket of paint. I mean it's interesting to see how much the kind of weird crap on there really does tickle their brains in the right places. and like they crave it. Like they're like, yes, I must watch these terrible animations of just colors moving

or like a kid just unboxing a toy, you know. YouTube generates an estimated $10 billion a year in ad revenue, and kid programming is a big part of that. The highest paid YouTube star last year had a channel where he unboxed toys, like Legos. We're going to do what's inside the box challenge. He made $22 million. He's seven years old.

So there's a lot of money to be made if you can find a way to attract a bunch of young subscribers and cater to their tiny evolving attention spans, which means the giant invisible mass of people who are always trying to cheaply make money on the internet, a bunch of them have now stampeded over to kids' YouTube. So this is Blippy. Katie did a story about him. He's kind of got a mime vibe, except he wears a bright blue. shirt and bright orange suspenders and these huge fake glasses without lenses in them.

His videos, which are about like pizza and fire trucks, get millions of views. But hey, this looks like a hammer, right? Yeah. But behind the scenes, the guy is also a guy who, the year before he created the children's character, he was trying to be like a viral gross out guy and he like had a viral video where shad on his friend and stuff. Wait, really? Yeah.

He made a heart, do you remember the Harlem Shake meme where it was like a clip of a techno song where it sort of starts out soft and then the beep drops and the song changes. And the videos would be sort of two phases where it would start off with like one person dancing sort of by themselves. And then as soon as the beat dropped, it would be like a whole room full of people like in crazy costumes dancing all funny. Yeah. So he made a Harlem Shake meme where he starts out with like him dancing on the toilet by himself. and then, you know, when the beat drops, his friend appears, and they're both, like, totally nude, and he takes a shit on his friend.

Wow. Like, a giant explosive diarrhea shit. Wow. And, like, it's honestly, like, an incredibly funny video. Like, it's the best, like, by far, the absolute funniest Harlem Shake meme I've ever seen in my life. But, you know, he made that in February, and by the next January, he had started this Blippy character who now has videos.

Like, they're wild. He has videos to get just like hundreds and millions of views. And to be clear, Katie actually thinks that Blippi's probably harmless. To her, he's just an example of how there's absolutely no vetting process for who gets to have an audience of millions of kids. What actually does feel scary are these other videos that are also popular with kids, although they're further out on the fringe from Blippy. These are videos that are aimed at kids. where the content is not stupid, mindless fun, where it's actually designed to disturb them,

where they'd see stuff like real kids getting bound and gagged by an adult man, or a video where a kid gets stuffed into a washing machine by a guy in a clown mask, or another one that's just a kid in a dentist chair with a mouth full of blood. YouTube finally cracked down on this particular genre video after BuzzFeed wrote about it,

but not before they'd already racked up tens of millions of views. There had also been another sort of YouTube for kids' scandal where it was discovered that there was this sort of pedophile ring running on YouTube where they would find videos that had been uploaded from young girls where, you know, maybe they would just be like hanging out in their bedroom, but there would be like one shot where, you know, they'd be in like revealing clothing or something. And the pedophiles would all comment it, like with the timestamp of that exact moment in the comments to sort of signal to each other like,

hey, fast forward to, you know, three minutes and ten seconds. And that there was, these videos would all sort of recommend to each other. So there was this whole panic about pedophiles on YouTube. And was that a thing that was really happening? That was a thing that was really happening. Oh, wow. Yeah. YouTube's response to this was to delete the comments, ban the accounts that made them,

and actually in most cases to just make it so videos aimed at kids couldn't have comments at all. But so if you're a parent who just sometimes wants to put their kid in front of YouTube so they can just send one email, this is the world of things that you now have to worry about. In fact, the part of the MoMo story that I found least credible, which was the detail about how kids were seeing otherwise normal YouTube videos that were spliced in at some point would just be someone telling them to harm themselves. Something like that actually did happen in real life. So there actually was like a real news story of people like trolls who had spliced in, in stories. of like how to harm yourself in the middle of kids videos. That had actually happened? Yes.

So that had actually happened. And there was like news reports of this just a few days before the MoMo thing. I actually looked up this video. It's really disturbing. It's a couple of minutes of just animated characters waddling around. And then a guy walks across the screen, stands in the middle, and mimes holding a knife over his arm. He says to the camera, remember kids. Sideways for attention.

Sideways for attention. Long ways for results. End it. And then a few days later, a very similar version of this story pops up, but this time it's this hideous bird lady named Momo who is telling kids to hurt themselves. So Momo apparently actually came to the U.S. from Latin America. And what was happening over there was that kids were going on WhatsApp, and they were sending each other pictures of Momo,

saying, Momo was this monster and you had to do whatever she said. Somehow that got turned into the idea that kids were committing suicide because of Momo. Never proven. But parents freaked out.

The police got involved. The media got involved. And then somehow, that image went from Latin American Internet and TV over to American Reddit. From Reddit, it went to 4chan, and Katie's best guess is that that's where it happened. She thinks it's possible

that trolls could have intentionally taken that rumor and spread it to parents on Facebook because they just thought it would be funny to watch them freak out. I can imagine the teenage boys on a Discord server, like, private chat room, and they're laughing. And, you know, I'm defensive because I am a mom. I'm like, hey, don't make fun of moms. Or, like, I get it that, like, mom on Facebook is, like, an easy, like, Mark to make fun of, sort of.

Yeah, and it just feels like, right. It sucks because it's both like the joke is mean and shitty and the joke working. It makes it look like they're right, but I don't think they're right. Yeah. I mean, I think that, like, what's sort of annoying about it a little bit is there's a certain element of like, if I say to you, hey, guess what? I had a hamburger for lunch. And you were like, okay. And I was like, ha ha, I totally fooled you.

I actually had a burrito. I'm totally lying. You'd be like, yeah, okay, well, that was a reasonable thing you told me. Why would I doubt that? So I feel like it's one of those lies where it's like you're not really pulling one over so much on someone because it was kind of believable. So good job. You just lied. What I didn't understand and what is crazy is that this is believable.

Like that's the thing I didn't know. It's like, oh, all these crazy parents are believing that people put razor blades and candy at Halloween. And then you find out like, well, they don't put razor blades, but they put tiny daggers and broke a plastic. Yeah, exactly. Because you don't have to believe that the thing's working. You can just believe that it's out there to hurt your kids, like to scare them. And while that's not true, it's totally believable. Yeah.

If the fear is that 4-chan trolls are trying to fuck with your kids, that's true. Like, they are. Yeah. Katie Natopoulos. You can read her very, very good piece about Blippie's viral video of him taking crap on his friend and all of her other wonderful tech reporting on BuzzFeed News. Oh, I was just going to say, like, Lucy, I was listening to your robocall episode. And I feel, I'll be honest, I feel like I don't totally feel satisfied by it.

Really? What do you want? I guess, like, it's so, I guess so, so part of what I'm curious about is, like, the, the, how it works, spoofing the phone number. So I understand that, like, they, they are targeting you based on your location, but, like, how do they seem able to call from a seemingly. endless amount of phone numbers that, like, eerily look very similar to my own. Yeah. I guess I would love to know what the machine is that makes the fake phone numbers. Right. Right.

That's always part of the mystery to me, I think. Okay. Let me find out if we can figure that out. Okay. After the break, we try to fix the Robocall story for Katie. Fia. PJ. Alex.

PJ. Tommy. Do I all have to say PJ? It's a free country. PJ? So an interesting thing happened when I called Katie, which was that she was like, I want to talk to you about the Robocalls episode. Not in like the tone of voice of somebody who loved something. Oh.

Oh no. For our listeners, a couple weeks ago, we did an episode called Robocall Bang Bang, which was about just how Robocalls have gotten so much worse lately and why. And also about a theory that Damiano has. had about how he was being targeted for robocalls based on his location. And I guess that Katie didn't like it. She was like, I feel like I still have questions that didn't get answered. Huh. Number one was just like, how do robocallers actually spoof numbers?

Like, how could they make it look like the call that Katie's getting is coming from Katie's phone? Uh-huh. Or from a phone number that's like one digit off of hers and do it like tens and tens of times a day? I know the answers to all these questions. Well, look at you. Not to brag. Not to brag, but I know the answers. That was like...

Willing to share them all with you. If something, if there was like a catastrophic event and we lost know-it-all voice and it had to be like recreated and you were still alive, everything would be fine. Listen, you have questions, I have answers. It's as simple as that. Okay.

So what you're talking about is spoofing, which is the act of calling someone using a phone number that's not the phone number you're actually dialing from. Basically faking caller ID. Yes. And that's actually very easy to do.

There is software you can get that's very cheap. if not free, that allows you to just put in whatever number you want. Like, you can just say, I want my caller ID to be 911 and it'll work? You could say you want your number to be the White House's number. You could say you want it to be whatever you want. And why is that possible? Because it is a terrible, ridiculous flaw that was baked into the telephone system decades ago.

So caller ID came to the U.S. in the late 80s. From where? They had it in Japan for a long time before then, believe it or not. Weird. Okay. People were getting caller ID boxes at their houses. And that posed a problem for big companies because they wanted any phone call that you got from the company, regardless of where it originated from, to have the companies like 1-800 number. So, like, if, if, like, 1-800 contacts calls you from one of their centers, you just wanted to make it to people call back 1-800 contacts no matter what.

And at the time, the only way to do it was to purchase, like, a really, really expensive phone line from the big phone companies. But then in the mid-2000s, making phone calls over the Internet suddenly became really easy. right? Yeah. And they gave all the same functionality to those phone lines. So on those phone lines, you could do the same thing that these huge companies were doing for much, much cheaper. Got it.

So any mope with a computer and an internet connection can call people for any number that they want. Okay. I understand what's happening. I don't understand why they don't just fix it, though. Do you want to know who agrees with you wholeheartedly? Who? Domiano Marquetti.

Every time we talk about it. Every time someone says it, they're just like, well, you know, this system was made decades ago before people had the capability to make these calls. But Damiano's like, what's wrong with you people? Well, I just, and I can't get anyone to agree with me, which makes me feel insane. But it's like literally the way it was explained to us is that like, if you're making a voiceover IP call, which is how like a lot of these robocalls are made, like over the internet as opposed to like over a landline. Yeah. There's just like a box that points up being like, which number are you calling to? What number do you want to be calling from?

And every time someone tells me that, I'm just like, do these people who invented the system not live in a world where like people have other than good intentions sometimes. Even even even even even even even when it's like oh but don't worry it was like decades ago and it was all companies like companies also do bad things like it just feels weird that right like okay we want to provide this one narrow uh opportunity of convenience and so we'll just create a system that has no security at all. It's funny Alex and I when we were working on long distance which is our story about tracking a robocallor down. Yeah. We actually used a call spoofer. We knew that people knew our. number and wouldn't pick up. Oh, so you spoofed a different phone number. I signed up for this service called spoof card that made it look like I was calling from Indian phone numbers so they would pick up. Oh, I forgot. I used to have an app like this.

Yeah, I used to do this. Actually, I got a hold of one of, like a call spoofer in high school, and I would just call people from other people's numbers at weird hours, and then they would call people and be like, why did you call me? And I just, like, enjoyed being a... You would spoof numbers. When we worked at WNYC, you would spoof numbers and then call me. with like a prank phone call soundboard.

Yeah. It was really good. It was so annoying. He'd sit across from me. And I'd be like, hello. And it would be like, Hey, this is Larry from that mechanic. It was really, it was like super low grade.

Your butt broke down. And Alex would sometimes fall for now. Like he would start talking to a recorded sound voice. And then it got to a point where he was getting so mad that it like wasn't an okay joke to do anymore. It was never funny. It was very funny to everyone watching you react. For someone who likes prank calls so much, it seems like you don't like to be on the, end. I will say the funny thing is that one time PJ was trying not to laugh, and the way he did it was by opening a drawer and putting his head in just so he couldn't look directly at me. And it was like visually very pleasing. Anyway. So all of this is to say that it is very easy. It's easy enough that PJ would use it to prank phone call me at work. And the system's been built in such a way that like I don't know how they would fix that. Well, you shouldn't say they, you don't know how to, they're going to fix that.

because they're trying to fix it right now, right? Right now you can just go on your telephone little interface and be like, I want to be calling from, you know, PJ's aunt's number. Yeah. But they've created this like little signature, which basically like what will happen is like when you're getting a phone call from somebody, your phone company could actually check like, where is this phone call actually coming from? I just want to add a thing about that because I know about that too.

I don't know how we think. The reason that I asked all three of you to be in this room is because I know that you guys are like the three-headed god of understanding. This is just like surround sound robocall. Yeah. Knowledge. Team robocall know at all. Yeah.

So the thing that Damiano is talking about where like telephone calls are going to have a little signature in them, that's actually this project that a bunch of experts have been working on. And it's called stir shaken. Stir shaken? Yes. Stur shaken. And it's a group of people from the telephone community like AT&T, Verizon, Google. And they've all gotten together.

And they're working on this plan where they'll actually be able to catch. robocallers because of this little signature in the calls. I think all of the major telephone companies have announced that they're going to be putting this in place this year. So 2019 should hopefully be the year that, like, robocalls start getting better. Oh. Okay. So that's a pretty nice, nice update.

Okay, so wait, so going back to Katie's thing, one of the things you want to understand, like, why is it so easy to spoof numbers, have that. But, like, in the episode, you guys would be like, they use a robo dialer. They use an auto dialer. What exactly is an auto dialer? Like, what does it actually look like? So there are basically two ways you can auto dial. There's like one that's kind of more above board, which is there are companies where you log into a website and they have a service that you upload a file to and a file of phone numbers.

A file of phone numbers, like a CSV file, like an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah. And you press a button. and it dials those numbers. So that's if, like, the above board use would be like, it's a snow day. We got to call all the parents. Yeah, exactly.

So there's, like, talk desk. It's like a site that allows you to do that, but it also, like... Do that. Call a bunch of people. Call a bunch of people. I was picturing for no reason at all an actual machine, and I'm, like, slightly disappointed that it's a website.

No, it's not actually a machine. It's a computer somewhere. You thought it was a machine? Yeah. Why did you think, like, you had to go in the room and, like, use Svetlana? Yes. I pictured like a Soviet era

Like that like weird Like an answering machine Yeah and there were like buttons on it And there's like maybe if I really You put punch cards in it And there's like a robot hand that like hits the numbers I didn't really think that but I think that's the world of machinery that I was picturing Well I've got something that's a little closer to what you're describing

It's basically like the digital version of what you're describing Okay So rather than Going to a website They're also sort of much more sort of fast and loose software that you can download and will be on a computer and you can dial using that. That's a little better because then I picture somebody's laptop, their auto dialer a laptop that's just sitting there running on the car. And that's, I mean, that's pretty much what it is. I've got a

screenshot of auto dialer pro, which is like, that sounds shady as out. It looks like the thing you're describing. Let me just show you. Oh, yeah. This is the stuff. It's like the gray old, old Windows style. It looks like Windows 2000. Is this a, this is a contemporary program? Oh my God. And it actually has graphics of a old telephone dial pad on it. Mm-hmm. And so what you do is... This is what I wanted it to be. So what you do is, again, you can upload a spreadsheet of phone numbers to it.

But the other thing that I learned while I was going over the Auto Dialer Pro website is that there are scripts that you can execute on it. Like computer programming. Yeah, to make phone calls so that it will hang up if X happens. Like hang up if it gets an answering machine. Hang up if busy. it can select based on the area code of the person they're calling, it will automatically choose that area code as the dialer.

That makes sense. And it can even get more granular than that. It can match the first four numbers or the first six numbers. It can look like it's coming from your number. Here's something I'm curious about. One of the things that I've believed is that if I ever pick up the phone, then they know that it's a real phone number and they'll call me forever. And so I really don't pick up the phone.

Does the software kind of do that? Can be like, if pick up, keep on list. Yes. pretty much any auto dialing software, if a human picks up, it can mark that number so that it can call it back more often. Really?

It can also mark the phone numbers of people based on how long they stay on the phone with a recording. So if a person's on it for like 10 seconds, as opposed to five, you can call them back more often. Oh, no. Yeah.

They have like a sucker list. Yeah. But the other thing is that these auto dialer apps, they don't just let you call one number at a time. They let you call like hundreds or thousands of numbers at a time. Oh, that hadn't occurred to me. I was literally thinking a machine

that like calls someone, hang up, call someone. No. Oh my God, Beach. I don't know. These things are not, I don't think these are as obvious as you think they are. I think you've spent a little bit too much time in Robocall land. All right. Does that answer your questions?

Let me just actually play this back in my head. So the way it works is it's super easy to spoof phone numbers because the phone companies left this loophole so that like AAA could call you or whatever and have their corporate number show up. But they might fix it soon. but because it's easy to spoof caller ID if you know somebody's location it's really easy to spoof like

the phone number of where they are to them and that's happening with these huge software unfortunately programs that can just call hundreds of thousand people simultaneously and the software itself can be configured to like try to outsmart humans basically

right okay I feel like if this is what we put in the original op so I think Katie would really like that Can I just say real quick that since the last episode aired, I got really into a terrible phone game. Oh no. What is it?

It's called Matchington Mansion. Oh, you told me about this one. And it's basically just like Candy Crush, except every time you win a level, you get a star and you can use the stars to renovate a dilapidated mansion. Oh, it's the two kind of addictive games you should push together. That's horrible.

So what's your mansion look like now? He showed it to me. I've cleaned up the master bedroom and the library and the foyer. It's insane because you do not clean the actual spaces. I was just going to say. I don't understand why this is attractive to you. No, he's like changing the wallpaper. He's not like just tidying.

Yeah, I fixed the fireplace. Also in real life. I feel like I would really enjoy updating that house. You guys shouldn't be allowed to talk to each other. Reply-all is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Holdman. We're produced by Shreuthy Pinnamanini, Fia Bennon, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, Jessica Young and Emmanuel Jochi. Our shows edited by Tim Howard.

We're mixed by Rick Kwan. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Christina Ayale de Josa. Special thanks this week to Chris Drake. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. Matt Lieber is like right after you have a terrible cold, and someone tells you something that makes you laugh,

and for the first time in weeks, it doesn't also make you call. You can listen to the show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks. Thank you.