A series of posts on social media claiming that US military raided and seized the servers of electronic voting company Scytl to gather evidence of manipulation in the recently concluded US Presidential elections are fake. The hoax stated that seized data revealed that US President Donald Trump has won the recent elections by a landslide.
The hoax gained momentum in the wake of US President Donald Trump repeatedly alleging electoral fraud leading to rival democratic candidate Joe Biden becoming President-elect.
What Started the Fake Claims?
The viral rumor claimed that not only the elections results were manipulated but also Trump won the elections with a huge margin. A series of social media posts stated that computer servers belonging to the Dominion Voting Systems and/or Scytl Secure Electronic Voting companies had supposedly been seized by the U.S. military in Frankfurt, Germany. The data seized from the devices revealed that Trump had actually won a landslide victory in the Nov. 3 election.
The hoax further gained momentum after getting a validation from U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas. Later, Gohmert clarified saying, "I don't know the truth. I know that there was a German tweet in German saying that on Monday, U.S. army forces went into Scytl and grabbed their server."
GreatGameIndia published an article headlined: 'INTEL: US Military Raided Scytl Servers in Germany For Evidence After Vote Switching Scandal.' The outlet claimed in its article that intelligence sources in US Military raided voting machine company Scytl servers in Germany for evidence of manipulation in 2020 US Elections. "Scytl has a long history of election fraud in various nations including injecting backdoors in its election software. The issue has prompted experts to question why the sensitive job of counting votes was outsourced to a foreign company?" read the article.
Scytl Denies Having Any Office in Germany
According to Snopes, after the fake claim went viral, Scytl clarified that neither do they have any servers or offices in Frankfurt, nor that had been raised by the US military authorities. "The technologies implemented by Scytl in the US are both hosted and managed within the US, by a local subsidiary, SOE Software, based in Tampa, Florida. We do not tabulate, tally or count votes in the US. We do not provide voting machines in the US. We did not provide online voting to US jurisdictions for the US elections," read their statement.
Despite the claims being completely baseless, it gained momentum on the social media sites including Twitter. "Holy sh*t! The military raid that resulted in possession of the Scytl server in Germany wasn't at Dominion it was on CIA property where they manipulation many countries votes!!! Deep state take down coming!" tweeted a user.
"Scytl is now denying the raid. Surprising no one a corporation is saying what it thinks will protect its bottom line. They are bankrupt. If they admit the raid happened they will lose clients who rely on their servers. They need clients to believe their data is safe," mentioned another.
