"Sydney" asked "Kormoran" "Where bound?", to which the raider responded "Batavia". "Sydney" may have then made signals asking for the raider's port of origin and cargo; the Germans who claimed this said their replies were "Fremantle" and "Piece-goods" respectively. At around 17:00, Detmers instructed his wireless operators to send a false distress signal indicating that "Straat Malakka" was being approached by a suspicious ship. The message, transmitted at 17:03 and repeated at 17:05, contained the distress call for a merchantman under attack from a raider instead of a warship (QQQQ, as opposed to RRRR), the latitude and longitude of the transmitting ship, the time per Greenwich Mean Time (normal practice was to transmit local time; using GMT was to let the "Kriegsmarine" know that the ship was actually a raider about to be lost), and the ship's name. This signal was partially received by the tugboat "Uco" ("QQQQ 1000 GMT") and a shore station at Geraldton ("[unintelligible 7C 11115E 1000 GMT"). The Geraldton station broadcast a message to all ships asking if there was anything to report (which was interpreted by the Germans as acknowledgement of their signal), but after no response was forthcoming, ignored it until a report on the signal was forwarded to the Naval Board on 27 November.