In an unfortunate mishap, Dutch police accidentally texted a link to an adult video to 1,900 witnesses of a house fire, which took place last month in the town of Nieuwleusen.
In the text, police encouraged witnesses to come forward with information that could help them figure out what caused the fire, as a result of which a 22-year-old man lost his life. Instead of a link the official police website, though, the text took recipients to an explicit video.
“The police today sent an SMS blast [Dutch: SMS-bom] to people with a link that is incorrect,” the police wrote in a statement. “A number of characters have dropped from the link in the message, creating a completely different type of link. This link leads to a page that we do not support.”
“We regret that this was how it went,” the statement continued. “Shortly thereafter, we sent a second SMS bomb with a working link.”
Police is currently investigating arson as the possible cause of the fire. Indeed, police apprehended the victim’s 16-year-old brother as a suspect, local outlet RTV Oost reports.
Interestingly, the link leads to a YouTube video, which has since been removed. Considering Google’s video sharing platform prohibits hard-core porn, it’s possible the clip wasn’t as raunchy as footage you’d find on actual porn sites. However, the video was certainly labeled as adult content, and accompanied by a warning to viewers, according to the police.
But then again, pirates have previously been able to exploit loopholes in YouTube to upload pornographic material.
According to stats from Bitly reviewed by TNW, the link has accumulated 66 clicks at the time of writing. It’s worth noting that a chunk of those clicks likely comes from people looking up the link after Dutch media shared screenshots of the erroneous text.
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