Watch: Meet the donkey getting paid to crash boring Zoom meetings as people work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic
Mambo the donkey is getting most of the virtual love, other animals also available
Working from home and tired of boring Zoom meetings? Now you can rent a miniature donkey to crash your video calls. Reportedly, a North Carolina farm is renting out Mambo to crash video conference calls.
Peace N Peas Farm will rent Mambo, the 8-year-old miniature donkey, and his friends to crash company conference calls, The Charlotte Observer reported.
According to Francie Dunlap, Mambo’s owner, this camera friendly donkey is “like a pesky little brother” that “doesn’t let anyone relax too long”.
While Mambo is getting most of the virtual love, other animals are also available to spice up tedious virtual meetings during the coronavirus pandemic. According to the farm animal’s meeting registration website, they include three horses, Heiren, Zeus and Eddie, along with some chickens and ducks.
Customers can reserve 10 minutes with the animals for $50 (Dh183.65), and co-workers can also choose a virtual meeting name for the farm animal.
Dunlap created a website on Saturday for people to reserve time with the animals. She said she’s had a number of inquiries. Apparently, not all are conference call pranksters. A few, Dunlap said, were teachers who wanted the animals to crash their virtual classrooms.
Hackers crash Zoom meetings around the world
Meanwhile, around the world many reports have emerged, of hackers crashing Zoom meetings.
According to news reports in India, today in the Indian state of West Bengal, two Kolkata-based professionals, who were working from home and using the Zoom video calling app, allegedly received ransomware threats, demanding payments in bitcoins.
Police have said that the hackers demanded ransom to release the data which were encrypted from their computers. The two men allegedly received emails from the hackers demanding payment in bitcoins. In the mail a specific link was also shared to purchase bitcoins, an official of the cyber-crime department said.
Police told news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) that the hackers have also allegedly threatened that non-compliance to their demands would lead to a permanent loss of the data.
According to one of the complainants, the hackers have demanded USD1,000 (Dh3670) in bitcoin to decrypt the files. Besides the state’s cyber-crime department, the Special Task Force (STF) has also started an investigation into the matter, police has said.