Verizon ‘maliciously’ sends civil emergency alert to New Jersey cellphone users

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Customers of Verizon Wireless received a text message yesterday that read,

CMAS Alert

Civil Emergency in this area until 1:24 PM EST Take Shelter Now

U.S. Govern

As you can see in the screenshot to the right posted to Reddit by a user going by the moniker “swordandstorm,” this message would clearly be alarming to anyone who thought it was real.

It turns out, there was no emergency whatsoever and the text was apparently sent out either mistakenly or, as some individuals in government have contended, “maliciously.”

Shaun Golden, Sheriff of Monmouth County, said, “There is no reason to panic here. It is a false text done maliciously today at 12:27 p.m.,” according to The Star-Ledger.

However, David Samberg, the spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said in a statement emailed to The Star-Ledger that, “This test message was not clearly identified as a test. We apologize for any inconvenience or concern this message may have caused.”

Samberg’s statement hardly clarified the situation, as it was already obvious that there was no identification of the message being a test in any regard.

The message was sent out to cellphone users in the counties of Monmouth, Ocean and Middlesex, causing an influx of 911 calls from individuals concerned about if the alert was real and if there was indeed an actual emergency.

Police in Rumson, a borough of Monmouth county in New Jersey, issued an alert of their own which read, “THERE IS NO EMERGENCY. The ‘take shelter’ message that Verizon sent IS NOT a VALID message. DO NOT CALL THE POLICE.”

The timing of the alert message is quite interesting, to say the least. It came only two days after many individuals in New Jersey reported feeling unexplained tremors.

On Saturday at 10 AM New Jersey residents in Newark, Bergen County and Sussex County all experienced a tremor which reportedly shook houses and made water ripple.

This apparently wasn’t an earthquake and while Paul Caruso, a geophysicist from the U.S. Geological Survey, confirmed that they “received a number of reports that people felt something,” he said, “We don’t know what it was.”

Speculation has been running wild amongst people who experienced it and even so-called experts like Caruso who told the Press of Atlantic City, “It could have possibly been a thunderstorm off the coast. A sonic boom, that’s another possibility.”

However, not a single seismometer located throughout the state was able to find “even a hint of trembling” on Saturday and there were no confirmed reports of thunderstorms around the time of the earthquake-like tremor.

It appears that the recipients of the text message alert were Verizon customers with phones using the Android Operating System.

A planner in the Office of Emergency Management in Middlesex County, Jim Zawistowski, said that they received calls from several police departments asking if the county was conducting “any kind of tests.”

Police departments in East Brunswick, Jamesburg, Monroe and South Brunswick all called the Office of Emergency Management, all seemingly confused as to who was behind the mysterious alert text.

“We told them it wasn’t us,” Zawistowski said, while adding that they had no word of tests being conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) either.

At this point mystery abounds. Some, like Sheriff Golden of Monmouth County, clearly think it was a malicious act while Verizon seems to be saying that it was an accident, although they have made no clear statements on the issue either way as of yet.

Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey, published a report saying that several people had received text messages stating that there was a dangerous emergency on the Brookdale campus.

They report that police informed them that the message was a hoax and no alarm is warranted.

“As of now the county, state and federal government are not aware of an emergency and believe that someone has hacked into the Verizon service to create panic,” the official Brookdale statement said.

They added that there is no validity to the alerts as far as they are aware, although it is unclear if the alert was separate from the one issued to Verizon customers around the state.

The mention of the message stating that “there is a dangerous emergency on campus” makes me think that it might have been a different message that made specific mention of the campus, or perhaps this is just somewhat opaque language and the message was the same as was received by others throughout the state.

I will keep you updated as details emerge and if any information comes out pertaining to who or what was behind this alert I will be sure to keep you informed on that front.

If you have any information on this mysterious message please do not hesitate to email me at [email protected] and tell me if I can use your report in future articles.

This article first appeared at End the Lie