Armenian authorities confront accusations of corruption in a recent disinformation campaign

In recent months, Armenia has found itself in the crosshairs of a growing wave of disinformation campaigns. The latest example is the Euleaks[.eu] website, a recently created fake news site, which has spread accusations against Anna Hakobyan, the wife of the Armenian Prime Minister.

The website, which mirrors the tactics used in other Russian disinformation campaigns, has been found to falsely credit FRANCE 24 journalists as the authors of its articles. However, six FRANCE 24 journalists have had their identities stolen and have not contributed to the Euleaks website in any way.

The accusations against Anna Hakobyan centre around allegations of draining 3.4 million dollars from a children's cancer fund. The video and article supporting these claims were published on the Euleaks website, and have since been shared by several pro-Trump accounts, including @IvankaNews and Leandro Romao.

The accusations were first declared by the Trump Fact News account on August 14. It is important to note that no information corroborates these claims made in the video and the article published by the Euleaks site. In fact, the search results do not contain information regarding who first raised these accusations against Anna Hakobyan.

The accusations come from Armenian lawyer Sergei Harutyunyan. However, Armenian lawyer Arsen Babayan, a member of Harutyunyan's law firm, has refuted these allegations, stating that Harutyunyan never made the statement mentioned in the article.

The video accuses Anna Hakobyan of embezzling the money while chairing City of Smile, a charity dedicated to supporting children with cancer, between 2018 and 2020. The Armenian fact-checking media outlet FIP.am reported Babayan's statement in a Facebook comment in response to a post that shared the false claim.

The Euleaks website includes dozens of articles on international news, likely rewritten with AI from existing English-language news articles. This is a common tactic used in disinformation campaigns to make the content appear more credible.

Darren Linvill, a disinformation expert at Clemson University, has noted that these operations are pivoting away from Ukraine and Zelensky and are now focusing their efforts on other countries such as Armenia and Moldova. In early August, a similar disinformation operation targeted the pro-European Moldovan President Maia Sandu.

The international anti-corruption organisation Transparency International's Armenian branch does not possess any information that would substantiate the corruption claims presented in the piece. This further casts doubt on the credibility of the Euleaks website and the allegations it has published.

Armenian authorities confront accusations of corruption in a recent disinformation campaign