Sources of Scandalous Wiretaps: What Scheme is Being Used?

Recently, there have been frequent releases of wiretapped conversations on the internet, mainly involving church officials and opposition figures, which have become the basis for criminal proceedings by law enforcement. However, one of the questions discussed among the public is how these recordings find their way to the internet, especially considering that such wiretaps can only be conducted by special services. This was reported by Civilnet.

“One of those recordings was a wiretap released on October 17, attributed to Archbishop Nathan Hovhannisyan and former Catholicos’ aide Father Aghan Yerjanakyans. This too became the basis for a criminal case,” Civilnet wrote.

On the same day, October 17, Arthur Hovhannisyan, a member of the “Civil Contract” faction, in response to a question from Petros Ghazaryan during a Public TV broadcast regarding whether the audio recording that appeared online was accidentally released by media close to his party, stated that their party’s official media outlet is the civic.am website. “But the initial source of those recordings was not those websites; there were, I don’t know which sites,” Hovhannisyan said.

Where did the distribution of the recording start? In the conversation attributed to Archbishop Nathan Hovhannisyan and Father Aghan Yerjanakyans, which allegedly took place in October 2023, the latter claims that Catholicos Garegin II instructed him to participate in anti-government protests with family members.

#CivilNetCheck’s study shows that the recording was first published on a Telegram channel named New Armenia Blog on October 17, at 12:03. The channel has about 3,700 followers. In addition to news articles, the page regularly shares posts mocking opposition figures as well as AI-generated fake images and deepfakes,” the website wrote.