Voting Threats

Posted in News

Please be advised there is an email currently circulating which threatens the safety of anyone not voting for a particular candidate in the upcoming presidential election.  These messages are attempts to influence your vote, and anyone who receives the message should forward it to GUPD as well as your local authorities.

This email contains threatening and intimidating language intended to force you to vote for one person. This email may even have your home address or other address associated with you. 

Important for you to know:

• Federal law enforcement is aware of this email campaign and authorities have traced it back to bad actors in Estonia. This has no real connection to the group known as “the proud boys”

• Voter registration information is public in virtually every jurisdiction, so none of the information that the sender has is private, so you should not feel like a victim of a data breach 

• UIS has set up blocks for this traffic on the Georgetown mail system

What you need to do:

• Report the email as spam in your mail interface (GMAIL, Outlook, etc) so that Google and Microsoft can recognize these as junk and block them at the source.

For more information, you can refer to these news reports:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/politics/florida-alaska-trump-emails.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/proud-boys-emails-florida/