An e-mail containing a death threat was sent to a university employee of the journalism department days after the Virginia Tech shootings, but was later determined to be a hoax that had been distributed worldwide, according to University Police Capt. Stan Skipworth.
The content of the e-mail – said to have originated from Egypt – was written in broken English and asked the recipient to pay an amount in the thousands of dollars or else she would be killed.
“The Internet provider assisted in the investigation and said that they had received several inquiries from a number of other parties from around the world asking about the same e-mail,” said Skipworth. “They had determined that it was basically a hoax.”
Skipworth called the e-mail a “phishing” scam.
According to the Symantec Corporation, the makers of Norton AntiVirus software and other Internet security programs, “Phishing is essentially an online con game and phishers are nothing more than tech-savvy con artists and identity thieves. They use spam, malicious Web sites, e-mail messages and instant messages to trick people into divulging sensitive information, such as bank and credit card accounts.”
“Unfortunately it was done, obviously, in very bad taste and in a very bad time,” said Skipworth, referring to the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 23. “The individual who reported this to our department did exactly the correct thing … We’re very grateful for the individual who reported it to us and gave us the opportunity to follow up on it.”
Skipworth said that Cal State Long Beach’s Information Technology Department helped the University Police with the investigation and coordinated with IT experts around the world.
“[With the IT department], we just followed the normal legal paths of obtaining subpoenas for information, or court orders for information,” Skipworth said.
Larry Himmel, operation and support manager for CSULB’s Desktop Support, said e-mail scams like this usually originate from overseas and sometimes even from Internet cafÃs abroad, which makes it harder to track down individual perpetrators.
“There are a lot of places where [e-mail scams are] their occupation,” Himmel said, adding that because mass e-mailing is so easy and relatively cost-free, “[They] can hit, literally, millions of people. With sheer percentages, somebody’s going to take the bait.”
Himmel said CSULB has a number of appliances that scan e-mails and look for known patterns in phishing scams or spam, but that a few messages still manage to get through.
“We get a lot of this stuff from time to time,” Himmel said. “But it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, because we have systems now in place to check it.”
