Several members of the Penn faculty and staff recently received a threatening e-mail, which claimed that the recipient was marked for death by an alleged hit man, whose contract could only be terminated if the recipient paid a certain amount of money.
The e-mail was brought to the attention of the Division of Public Safety, which then discovered that the message was part of a national e-mail scam currently being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
No Penn students reported receiving the e-mail to DPS. It is not clear how many faculty and staff members received the message.
The intent of the e-mail is to "frighten recipients and compromise the security of their personal information," according to a public-safety alert sent by DPS yesterday.
DPS sent out the alert by e-mail yesterday after more than 100 complaints citing the threatening e-mail poured into the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which fields online complaints of Internet crime.
As of now, the FBI has no evidence of any violence related to the e-mails.
College senior Jason Karsh, chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly, received the alert from DPS, and subsequently forwarded it to a number of student-group listservs.
The alert prevented the e-mail threat from causing stress to students, Karsh said, because the crime was caught "so early on."
Not all students received the alert by e-mail, however, and it is not clear which specific listservs received it.
Internet crime, according to the FBI, is "any illegal activity involving one or more components of the Internet." Once a crime is reported, it is forwarded to the agency with proper jurisdiction, which assigns the complaint to an investigator if necessary.
Anyone receiving a suspicious e-mail should report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center by filing a complaint at www.ic3.gov or contacting a local FBI field office directly.
