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.

How often has it happened to you that you send an email in anger and then immediately regret your action? And if not immediately then later after you realize that you were wrong to have sent that angry email for whatever reason.

I must confess that in my younger days, there were times that I did just that. A perceived offense or an injustice whether real or not would result in my fingers flying at the keyboard in a rush to defend myself and gain back some honor. I’d even go on the offensive and make some disparaging remarks about the recipient’s reputation. These angry emails were all in an effort to fill the void left by a loss of pride with some form of self-respect.

The results were never good. I would end up making an apology to someone and wishing there were some way I could take back those moments at the keyboard.

Several years ago there was a story that came out about a chief executive of an American health care company, Cerner Corporation, who wrote an email that turned out to be disastrous for the share price of company stock as well as the morale of company employees. In the email, employees were accused of being lazy and managers were also threatened with being fired. It seemed the employee parking lot was not full at 8am and was nearly empty by 5pm each day.

Continue reading Email Anger Management Tips