On April 1, the day before a key parliamentary election in Armenia, Yerevan-based activist Babken DerGrigorian received a warning from Gmail. “Government backed attackers may be trying to steal your password,” it read. Then came three emails from Facebook saying that someone was trying to reset the password for his account.

DerGrigorian admits he’ll probably never know for sure who was trying to get into his accounts, but it fit perfectly into a bigger picture of suspicious activity that saturated Armenian cyber-space around the election and mirrors some of the election-related mischief in the U.S.

It started in late March when dozens of Russian-language profiles using the #armvote17 election hashtag began tweeting what they claimed to be an email from USAID, the development arm of the U.S. government. The letter expressed support for the opposition and implied that the U.S. was meddling in the Armenian election. “An NGO is trying to sabotage the vote,” many of the tweets read.

The U.S. embassy was quick to laugh the email off, pointing to numerous spelling mistakes and that it came from a Gmail account. “Recycled tricks and recycled lies. If you are going to lie, at least be creative about it,” the embassy wrote on its Facebook page. On March 29, a new version of the email with the mistakes corrected and Gmail address cropped out was shared on Pastebin, a website popular among coders for storing and sharing text.