Received an email threat at work

[Cwenthryth]

So yesterday I wrote a comment on Julie Bindel’s piece in the Sunday Times supportive of her. I used my own name.

This morning, I have come to work and opened my work email, to find this email.

It’s probably spam. I don’t think my work email is that easily available, you could google and find my department but that wouldn’t come directly to my personal email.

I hope it’s just spam, there’s nothing direct in it, it doesn’t mention my name or any specific reason.

But should I take action or just delete & block? I thought I’d ask on here in case anyone else has been similarly targeted.

Of course it's spam. It's somewhat paranoid to suggest it's a result of an obscure comment on a newspaper article.

spam spam spam! But report it to your IT, they should be able to filter this stuff out usually so this one has sneaked through...

I've had the porn/webcam ones several times. Its just a phishing expedition to see who's scared enough to pay.

It's quite obviously spam, but if receiving this has made you so worried that it is connected to an online comment you have made, may I suggest that you stop using your real name when making online comments. As pp suggest forward it to your IT department and forget about it.

Definitely contact your IT department - info security will want to know.

It's easy to get spooked by these scams, but do a bit of critical thinking. Is there any evidence they know you or anything about you? Is there anything more than vague generalities in the email?

In this case, no and no.

Even if there is specific information, it may have come from a large-scale data breach and still not be specifically targeting you.

That has to be the most poorly written threatening letter I've ever seen!

And of course it's spam.

That was SO hard to read - my eyes are bleeding. I would want to annotate it with my red pen for bad English and bad grammar and return to sender!!

No-one who writes like that can possibly be a serious threat!

I'm not great with technology so sorry if this is a silly question - but why do you think this is related to the comment you made in the Times article? I get loads of these sent to my work email & wouldn't have even thought they were related to anything I'd written online - am I wrong? I thought they were just sent to random email addresses?

Practically speaking, if he were actually operating on the dark web and his business involved being contracted by people to do mean things to other people, and then habitually approached his victims and offered them the chance to not only avoid the mean thing but find out who asked for the mean thing to be done... well, it wouldn't be very good business, would it? No-one would ever employ you once word got around...

Just spam.

Our IT dept. has asked us to just delete these as they were overwhelmed going through them and don't really need to see them.

Anytime someone wants bitcoin or gift cards/vouchers it's surely spam.

My ancient mother got one of these and immediately knew it was spam, because as she primly said to me, she hasn't even watched 50 Shades of Grey! [big grin]

My OH got one of the porn ones and he emailed back saying that seeing as they knew which sites he was visiting could they recommend any better ones he may have missed. Strangely they didn't contact him again.

It's spam - I've had a couple of them too (freaked out until I googled the wording and found others had them).

I get the porn ones too - which are obviously spam because I don't watch porn and wank in front of my laptop.

Flag it to your IT department. I had a similar type email come through from a chancer. The IT department told me not to respond as this would validate that this was an active email address and the sender was blocked from our system.

Thanks for the support & reassurance! I’ll alert IT. I’ve never had one like this before, my spam is usually just trying to flog me things, not threaten/extort. And I have very little spam on this email, it’s really only used within the organisation or for professional communication, not usually on mailing lists etc

For those dismissing my concerns or calling me paranoid for being worried about the possibility of being targeted after posting public support for JB - keep up dears, is all I can say. There have been very real threats made to professional women, it is not unreasonable that this triggered concern.

Obviously spam ffs. We get this shit all the time at work.

It is spam, I had one the other day re supposedly outing my porn use lol i just deleted it.

re you not receiving a lot of spam.

our IT sends out statistics every now and then and the amount of mail that gets filtered out before it reaches you is huge.

I get one special one that says how to get a bigger boner 😂😂😂😂😎

I get one special one that says how to get a bigger boner

I used to get regular state agnostic penis enlargement ones. Decided one day to respond with a snarky email pertaining to my lack of necessary physique for a potential enlargement and copied in Kevin from IT, mentioning that, as a man, he might be more interested. Which led to Kevin copying in his colleague Jezza, me looping in my mate Marc, Marc getting hiw wife in on the conversation for her to share her take on just how much of an enlargement he should be going for ... etc.

Ended up keeping a bunch of us busy for a boring Friday at the office - and still ranks in our top 3 workplace hits on the grounds that it all ended with the spammer asking us to stop spamming him and blocking all of us.

Just a coincidence, OP. We got one like that to a generic group email at work too; also another that says we’d been caught watching porn - send money to hush it up; another that said they had control of our IT system - send money to avoid a shutdown.

Very common extortion spam and often sent to work emails, because the sender is aware that some people will be terrified of possible consequences.
Here is an article from Malwarebytes on extortion emails.

blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2019/02/sextortion-bitcoin-scam-makes-unwelcome-return/

I got one threatening to inform my clients of my internet habits and thereby destroy my business. Sure my clients would find my viewing habits extremely dull (mumsnet holiday booking amazon prime for books etc)