Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller was all set for a virtual event on Thursday when it had to be canceled after a participant displayed pornographic content on the event’s live feed on Zoom.
Waller was to address the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA) to give his remarks on the economic outlook, but a few minutes before the scheduled start of the event, a participant with the screen name ‘Dan’ began flashing pornographic images, according to a Reuters reporter who was present. The images were visible to all of the event’s 220 participants.
“We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret,” said Brent Tjarks, executive director of the MBCA.
Tjarks added that he suspects that the incident was due to an error in the setting of the security switches that mutes the audio and video feeds of participants. The Fed later released Waller’s prepared speech with a statement that said “there are technical difficulties with Governor Waller’s virtual event and it has been canceled.”
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