Perth Voice Interactive

SOMEONE’S playing silly buggers with the Wi-Fi names down near the police building at Curtin House on Beaufort Street.

Regular Voice correspondent Andrew McDonald was in the area looking for a Wi-Fi hotspot when he noticed some suspicious signal names.

The names are customisable by whoever sets up the modem, and they usually have prosaic titles like “Cafe Wifi #1”.

But Mr McDonald, who used to run the sardonic website The Worst of Perth, spotted signals “POLICE_SURVEILLANCE_VAN3” and “POLICE_SURVEILLANCE_VAN4”, which would surely spook any crook from going online.

He says he tried some obvious password combinations like “Ben_cousins123” but had no luck signing in. We got in touch with the WA police media unit to ask if their officers could really be so blatant with their secret signals. Rest easy, they’re more subtle than that.

“None of the below Wi-Fi names belong to or have anything to do with police,” police media’s Susan Usher tells us.

Mr McDonald suggests if they are on the hunt for undercover names they could go with something like “Generic_Pizza_Van_4” to throw off the crims.

by DAVID BELL