In 1998, the world was creeping closer to the new millennium and utterly terrified of the Y2K bug. But Tiger Electronics swooped in to distract us all with a piece of hardware that took over the globe: the Furby. Underneath that fur, it was marketed as a machine packed with light sensors, infrared ports, and groundbreaking “Artificial Intelligence”.
The marketing was so impressive, it managed to completely fool the American National Security Agency (NSA). In early 1999, the NSA officially banned Furbies from their headquarters, genuinely believing these little toys were recording classified, top-secret conversations and repeating them to foreign agents.
The hilarious reality? The Furby couldn’t do any of that. The “learning” was a complete hard-coded scam—just a cheap microphone hooked up to a hit counter. Tiger Electronics essentially sold a glorified egg timer to the masses and made the US government look completely stupid in the process.
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