Alleged "bomb threats" have been posted on a Scottish tourism social media account to more than 140,000 of its followers, as police are investigating the source.
Police Scotland has said that they are aware of posts shared on social media threatening to “bomb” public buildings, supposedly including "shopping centres and universities".
The account, 100Scotland, has made two posts today, both of which mention and tag an account which links to a SoundCloud (a music-sharing website) account for someone who claims to be based in "Ural mountains, Russian Federation".
At the time of writing, the account has 140,469 followers on Instagram.
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One post read: “Hello, we are from the terrorist group WF. We’ve decided to use this group to let you know about our pranks.
“We’ve planted bombs in all shopping centres, universities and other places where bio-rubbish congregates in Scotland.”
The post added: “Good luck finding our bombs.”
The video goes on to show multiple people with "one of our killas" or "another killa" written across them, then adds "Scotland will be dead."
The posts also advertise a Telegram account. Telegram is an encrypted cross-platform messaging app for sending messages, photos, videos, voice notes and files, and for making voice or video calls. It works on phones, computers and the web, with ordinary chats synchronised across your devices.
In practice, it is used both like WhatsApp for private messaging and like a social publishing platform for following public channels. However, the app has different privacy features that allow users to interact without needing to reveal a phone number, making identity detection difficult.
A spokesperson for Police Scotland said: "We are aware of the posts and are assessing them to establish the source."
