Comment by snickerbockers

I'm putting my money on somebody fat-fingering the wrong contact. Maybe it's just me but I swear every phone I've ever owned has had extremely unreliable UIs, stemming from a combination of phantom touches being detected, and the phone moving buttons around as I'm trying to interact with it, as if it's on dialup line struggling to load somebody's Sonic the Hedgehog fanpage on GeoCities one gif at a time in 1996. And it's just phones too, this never happens on my PCs.

Of course, none of this excuses the failure to verify the identities of everybody in their chat, the choice to use a (probably) unvetted app on a (probably) unvetted personal device, or any other of a number of basic opsec rules that should be obvious to anybody who is vested with the authority to order an airstrike on the other side of the planet.