A New York IT admin, angry at being laid off, now faces 5 years in prison for sending his former employer  email threats and attempting to extort money from them.

Viktor Savtyrev, 29, pleaded guilty to extortion after he threatening emails and attempting to extort money from his former comapny. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Savtyrev threatened his former employers with computer crashes. He also threatened to enlist Eastern European hackers to launch attacks against his former employer, New York investment firm Third Avenue Management.

“My comrades for a small fee are able to help me out with bridging the firewall security and carry out data destruction and virus outbreak,” Savtyrev wrote in an e-mail to the company, according to the complaint. “I located the names and e-mail addresses of the editors of Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and the Daily News and all of them should be very interested in getting an article about a mutual fund (losing) data because some “Crazy Russian’ (this is the name of the article which I wrote last night), was fired after 5 years of loyal service.”

Unfortunately for Savtyrev, using email was a big mistake. The company promptly turned them over to the FBI and he was quickly tracked down. With layoffs at an all time high, it’s possible that other such incidents may happen. While you can’t blame someone for being angry over a layoff, such behavior is very unacceptable. If your company is planning any layoffs, make sure any login info and accounts that a laid off employee may have are changed or deleted immediately, just to be safe.

A DirecTV customer in Memphis, TN says a customer service representative sent her a threatening email after she called to pay her bill. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

A DirecTV satellite dish still sits on top of Sangueta Hawkins’ home, but for how much longer? She doesn’t know. On Monday, Hawkins says she called DirecTV customer service to help her pay her bill online. After being on the phone with the third representative, for 30 minutes, she paid and hung up.

Just minutes later she says she got an email from that same customer service representative, saying she and her family would die.

She says her email address on her DirecTV profile was also changed to Sangueta.FOOL.Hawkins. Memphian Quinton Ford was amazed at the allegations, “What would possess them to come towards their own customers like that”?

Sounds unbelievable that someone would treat a customer that way, doesn’t it? There were no details given for why it took 3 reps and at least half an hour just to pay her bill, but such behavior is still inexcusable. DirecTV said they’ve found the employee responsible but didn’t say if he/she had been terminated or even disciplined. Hawkins meanwhile has retained a lawyer.

This is a strong reminder that no matter how angry a customer may make you, always think before hitting send. In fact if you are angry, it’s best to step away from the computer and take some time to cool off before firing off an email. Professionalism demands putting the company’s interest before your feelings. Your job, and your company’s reputation may depend on it.

There’s a very interesting report on CNet about how the FBI used spyware to nab a variety of cybercriminals who committed crimes via email. Here’s an excerpt:

One suspect used Microsoft’s Hotmail to send bomb and anthrax threats to an undercover government investigator; another demanded a payment of $10,000 a month to stop cutting cables; a third was an alleged European hitman who was soliciting for business from a Hushmail.com account.

The FBI spyware, called CIPAV, came to light in July 2007 through court documents that showed how the bureau used it to nab a teenager who was emailing bomb threats to a high school near Olympia, Wash. (CIPAV stands for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier.)

An affadavit written by FBI Special Agent Norman Sanders at the time said that CIPAV is able to send “network-level messages” containing the target computer’s IP address, Ethernet MAC address, environment variables, the last-visited Web site, and other registry-type information including the name of the registered owner of the computer and the operating system’s serial number. 

The report points out that although anti-virus programs should conceivably detect such spyware, not one of the major companies that make such software would admit to helping the FBI in getting their spyware through such filters. Pretty interesting. While it appears to be used only for good at the present time you do have to wonder what might happen if CIPAV were to fall into the wrong hands. It just goes to show that our emails and presence on the net aren’t nearly as anonymous as we’d like them to be.

NPR’s Blog of the Nation blog has a humorous article about email blunders. We’ve all got one in our history, admit it! Here’s an excerpt:

Have you ever hit “reply-all” to an e-mail when you wanted only the sender to see your snarky remarks about the boss? Or received an e-mail from a friend you want to pass along to others, including your caustic comments about his girlfriend, but hit “reply” instead of “forward?” 

Email gaffes can be merely embarrassing or downright career threatening. To avoid them, there are a few things you can do. First, never email when angry, intoxicated or otherwise not in a calm and rational mood. Second, double check your spellchecker! The auto-correct feature isn’t always well… correct. Third, resist the temptation to hit Reply All unless absolutely necessary, always use BCC rather than CC and check and double check the TO: line before hitting that send button.

We’d like to know your most embarrassing email gaffe. Leave a comment and share!

The DeathbyEmail blog is reporting that a senior aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resigned following the discovery of several emails he sent in an attempt to organize a smear campaign against members of the Conservative Party, which are the PM’s rivals. The aide, Damian McBride, was previously Brown’s political spokesperson. Here’s a look at what the emails contained:

McBride suggested the website spread false rumors that pictures exist of Osborne “posing in a bra, knickers and suspenders” and “with his face ‘blacked up’,” adding: “He wouldn’t be the first student to do some cross-dressing at university. But … why would a student in the late 1980s black up his face for the amusement of friends in their private college rooms? This in the era when young Tories wore ‘Hang Mandela’ T-shirts.”

McBride wrote: “Embarrassing photos have followed George Osborne around throughout his career: posing in his Bullingdon Club uniform at Oxford, lying on the carpet at home in his permed mullet, playing Monopoly with his fellow viscounts and standing in an … embrace with a prostitute at a party in London. But he knows that the most embarrassing photos from his past have yet to emerge.”  (This is in a reference to pictures published in 2005 of shadow chancellor George Osborne with a prostitute, Natalie Rowe, taken 12 years earlier, and a notorious Bullingdon Club photograph of Osborne taken when he was at Oxford.  The Bullingdon Club is well-known for its members’ wealth and rowdiness.)

McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that Conservative Party leader David Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease.

Yet another case of a high ranking political official not thinking before he hit send. When will they learn? A very good rule of thumb when it comes to sending emails is to never send anything  you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper. Careless emails can damage company reputations, cost jobs and customers, and even get you in legal trouble. Think about that!

The Wall Street Journal has a great article on managing email overload. We’ve all experienced it, expecially these days when Blackberrys, netbooks and smartphones make it next to impossible to get away from it. Here’s an excerpt:

Limit your time with email. Turn off auto-notifications that alert you to incoming email. He also suggests not checking your inbox more than three times per hour. It’s rare that any message is so important that it can’t wait 20 minute to be answered, and if it were so urgent, the sender would try to reach you in other ways, such as calling or texting.

Some of my contacts have begun using automated messages saying that they only check email once a day at specific hours and to not get upset if their email isn’t answered immediately.

The article goes on to note other ways to manage your email and points out that some companies have gone so far as to institute “Email Free Fridays”.  They say this encourages employees to connect with their co-workers and customers in more conventional ways, and that those more personal connections have many rewards. How do you feel about email overload? Do you think email free Fridays are a good idea? Why or why not?

The Register reported that popular business ISP ClaraNet was down since early morning on April 3rd and estimated that that email service would be out until sometime late the following day at the earliest. ClaraNet said that service was partially restored – users could send and recieve email but c0uld not access any emails stored in their inboxes. The ISP say no emails have been lost.

          According to ClaraNet’s support site, incoming mail has not been lost, but is queued waiting to be delivered. The firm apologised for the inconvenience and targeted 6pm tomorrow for the restoration of full service.

The company has not publically explained the reason for the outage but some sources speculate that it was related to a failed RAID controller. Outages do happen, and it’s a good reminder to always have some sort of backup system in place just in case so that you can continue business as usual. Like electricity, you never realize just how much you depend on email until you’re suddenly cut off from it!

Another thing to remember in case of an outage is to communicate with your customers and vendors. Placing a notice on your website and/or on your company’s automated phone system is a good idea. A little communication goes a long way in building customer confidence and loyalty!

The NonProfit Times has a great article on what to do if your company receives complaints about bulk emailing. Although the article is aimed at non-profits, the information is useful to all kinds of companies and organizations.  Here’s an excerpt:

Even if your organization follows best practices, you may occasionally do something that triggers a spike in spam complaints. This is most commonly caused by gaps in permission-based list building practices or unwelcome changes in message frequency or content. A good email service provider will offer you tools for mitigating the impact of mistakes like this on your overall email delivery.

For example, emails that have been organically acquired following strict permission-based practices are much less likely to generate spam complaints than addresses that have been added via append services. If your email service provider can segment your mail stream by the permission basis of intended recipients, any spikes in spam complaints from lower quality lists can be insulated from the mail resources used to send to your core house file.

This is an excellent article. These days, when  sending out bulk emails from your company you need to be very very careful. Make sure you are following all the requirements of the CAN-SPAM act, and also review your emails to make sure the subject lines don’t contain words or phrases commonly associated with spam as they will be sure to trigger a spam filter, or worse, a blacklist somewhere along the line. Email can be a valuable tool for your company but you must exercise caution and care when using it.

When prosecutors in the Bernie Madoff trial presented the court with 96 pages of emails they claimed were from Madoff’s victims, one of them seemed oddly familar, and not in a good way. Here’s the email they found on page 36:

“My name is (redacted), but my origin is from Republic of Congo. I have an inherited fund I want to invest in business in your country with a help of a local. …If you can assist, I am willing to give you 10% of the funds that is $3.5 million,” reads the apparent scam letter contained on page 36 of the 96-page filing. A copy of the filing was posted online by MSNBC.

That’s right, prosecutors included a Nigerian scam email along with the ones from Madoff’s victims. A scam within a scam. Makes you wonder just how carefully prosecutors actually looked at the emails as they were gathering them.  Obviously it wasn’t near careful enough! The U.S. Attorney’s Office responsible for the case has so far not had any comment on the issue, and whether the blunder may harm the case has yet to be seen, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the judge to question the legitmacy of the other emails included with the scam one.

In another case of someone not knowing how to use BCC:, Brown University managed to publically reveal their list of Financial Aid recipients. Here’s an excerpt from the student newspaper:

Three of the messages showed the Brown e-mail addresses – including first and last names – of approximately 500 first-years, sophomores and juniors who have submitted financial aid documentation, and the fourth contained nearly 300. In all, The Herald counted 1,773 names mistakenly divulged Monday.

The messages, which were sent around 2:40 p.m. Monday from Financial_Aid@brown.edu, reminded students which documents they need to submit and of the application’s deadline. They did not state that the messages’ recipients were students who had begun the process of applying for financial aid, but Director of Financial Aid James Tilton confirmed that fact Monday night.

Really folks, BCC: is your friend. Not only does it protect the privacy of the people you’re emailing, it keeps their addresses out of the hands of scammers and spammers. Use it whenever you’re emailing a group of people!