Fired for e-mail porn

Sleipnir

No, not me, these guys.
Reported on unison.ie today.

The financial services company Merrill Lynch has sacked 13 of its Dublin employees as part of an enquiry into the sending of pornographic emails.
The firm told 20 of its staff in the capital to stay away from work on Monday as it carried out the investigation.

The remaining seven employees have been given written warnings and will be allowed to return to work next week.

It is understood that the group includes both male and female employees.

Heinrich

Good! Using company facilities for private use, even if not actually porn, is a dodgy affair and people who do so run the risk of being fired.

I don't have much sympathy for this sort of carry on...

chump

The poor folk who got sacked will have a hard time finding new employment. Feel bad for them. It's probably a very bad thing it was reported in the press.

Wishbone Ash

Edit - erroneous information.

Sleipnir

I dunno, maybe now people will think twice before sending that powerpoint on to their mates.

Red Alert

although looking through any risky emails i get i'll often see an email address from one of the big financial houses in the headers.

Heinrich

chump wrote:

The poor folk who got sacked will have a hard time finding new employment. Feel bad for them. It's probably a very bad thing it was reported in the press.

Why? They are employed to do a job and most of the larger companies have clauses on their contracts for this sort of thing.

It has become common practice to believe that the office is an extension one one's personal domain and it is high time to put things in their place.

When I was a lab technician/desk jockey I was amazed at the amout of stealing from the job. This ranged from excessive internet usage, private online banking, private emailing, ballpoint pen acquisition, inkjet cartridge, paper and stationery pilfering etc. Latecoming and Monday Morning Syndrome and various other ailments were accepted.

I have always done my internet at home and buy my own paper and ink/toner. That way I never ran unnecessary risks.

Sorry, but I do not have any sympathy for those who think the can get away with dishonesty!:mad:

Lump

I never sign up to stuff with my work e-mail, and I never give it to people outside work. 2 Reasons for this is that, I can't access work e-mail from home. Also to avoid this kind of thing, not porn e-mails, but spam/dodgyness in general.

For Personal use, I use G-mail notifier that I installed and it'll let me know if I have any private e-mails. IT have seen it installed on the Task bar when they remotely logged on to fix and error, they hovered over it briefly, but the bloke didn't give me grief!

John

wheres me jumpa

Good point made above. I always find it extremely funny when you get an email that has circled the world and the signature including phone, title, address, fax etc. of all the people in work is on it.

Im on a short term contract so I never open these forwards. But seen as I get the same forwards from multiple friends in work elsewhere they obviously open them.

Mrs. MacGyver

I delete any spam immediately without opening. The only emails i open are ones without attachments from colleagues only.

dvdfan

Lets be honest, this sort of thing is widespread in alot of companies and id imagine the 20 or so people involved were the only the tip of the iceberg. I know a place (that i wont mention but is a large company) where if an investigation was done at least 50% of the staff could be sacked or recieve a warning, i mean a proper investigation scanning every user sitewide. I presume this would be the same at alot of large companies.

Youll probably find that the 20 people involved was only an investigation of a couple of emails. If I.T were to scan all pc's company wide it may have been alot worse. Although im only speculating because i dont know how many employees have access to pcs in that company. You only have to look at the amount of names in some of the emails that have been forwarded many times to see how widespread it is. I dont think the smaller companies or companies where the staff are mostly IT staff would risk it as much simply because they realise how easy it is for someone to check all your emails, internet activity etc but larger companies not IT orientated is a different story.

This is not specifically porn, sometimes just pics of models, games, rude, racist and clean jokes etc

In fact alot of people are under the assumption that as long as they only recieve this material and dont send it on they cant be touched, dont know if this is true or not. What they think is, if i recieve an email how can i possibly know what it contains until i open it. But if they are constantly opening emails from the same person over and over on a daily basis i dont know if this excuse would work.

Inetersting topic but id guess that there is nearly as many people that would view this kind of material at work as wouldnt (In the big company, non it section that is) but judjing by the thread this dosent hold much water. Im wondering do most people have no sympathy because they detest porn or is it just because they were stupid to be doing this in work. I suppose i have some sympathy because i have viewed this kind of material in work in the past and yes it was stupid but i took the chance mainly because it was widespread and i taught they cant fire us all, which is nieve because as weve seen in the Merryl Lynch case they probably only done a small investigation about 1 or 2 emails more than likely sent to the worng person by mistake and then an investigation had to be done.;)

deman

Email addresses are harvested in many different ways, chain mails, viruses, from the net... etc.

I have NEVER given my work email address to anyone outside of work. I don't even send emails to colleagues with my work email address. I use it for recieving emails only. Yet, somehow, from time to time, I get spam. I know (at least I think I do) how these spammers found my email address... from a work contact's address book, which had been infiltrated.

So, if a person recieves spam, it might have nothing to do with what he/she has done, or not done. I've told my boss about this spam and he understands.

Heinrich

deman wrote:

Email addresses are harvested in many different ways, chain mails, viruses, from the net... etc.

I have NEVER given my work email address to anyone outside of work. I don't even send emails to colleagues with my work email address. I use it for recieving emails only. Yet, somehow, from time to time, I get spam. I know (at least I think I do) how these spammers found my email address... from a work contact's address book, which had been infiltrated.

So, if a person recieves spam, it might have nothing to do with what he/she has done, or not done. I've told my boss about this spam and he understands.

These are fair comments. The bottom line is the best. The boss can either ignore the issue or get the IT people to block the stuff.

deman

Heinrich wrote:

These are fair comments. The bottom line is the best. The boss can either ignore the issue or get the IT people to block the stuff.

It's a small company. He IS the IT staff, sales staff, after sales staff...... etc.:D

leeroybrown

These individuals were obviously not very smart. In my experience the financial sector is one of tightest when it comes to screening of e-mail, web usage etc. Even if Merrill Lynch were lax, sooner or later it was going to catch up with them.

Many employers define 'reasonable personal usage'. I've got no problem with checking my personal mail during work hours, using my internet banking account, using the internet for personal purposes or occasionaly downloading a few personal (legal!) files I need at work but that's because my employer doesn't have any problem with me doing this either. My previous employer defined 'reasonable personal usage' as light usage during breaks or for a little while in the evening and thats what people did there.

If someone is doing something that they would not be willing to do with their manager/boss standing beside them then they shouldn't be doing it.

Rcuomo

yea i agree with the above. Employers should allow limited personal use - obviously no porn or whatever but i find if you are allowed to have some personal use, you're productive in the long run rather then all work, work, work which is just de-motivating.

and heinrich, you need to lighten up....

FlutterinBantam

Good one good one.... yeah thats the way it goes... you can rob..gouge...fiddle taxes... screw the unwary....beat people up.. take up every scam you like...and everybody almost everybody says "fair play to ya"..
or ..must have been disadvantaged in childhood

but send a few risque bits and pieces over the internet and you are totalled..zapperonied...wasted... nuked offa the planet....

Don't condone it but seems a bit skewed to moi

zAbbo

The problem I have as a Sys Admin, is that people will use their work email address to signup for newsletters, purchasing online etc.

If they could use a personal email address(yahoo/gmail etc.) I'd be quite happy.

It's sad to say but only 50-60% of our emails are work related, despite many warnings.

A few employee's are walking a tight rope at the moment.

Women i find are the worst, with sending video emails of sexual acts.

Heyes

most if not all of the people i work with would be in serious trouble if every email was scanned,becasue of the amount of slaggings and banter that happens across the email..

Asok

zabbo wrote:

Women i find are the worst, with sending video emails of sexual acts.

I have to agree with this. When I used to do contract tech support the owners of the machines that were so badly ****ed over with spyware and ****e were women who's inboxes we mostly with with "FWD: xyzlol" crap that they wondered where it went when I removed it at server level. In one case I had to bill for re-installing 3 machines that were too heavily infected with crap from non work e-mails. I think the total came to around 350 euro for people abusing the service.

elvis2002

heh, Where I work, it seems you can surf the intenet 9 to 5 if you feel like it. Every time I look around I see guys on youtube, boards, googlevideo, etc. The only thing you cant do is download mp3 files.

I'd agree with the above, women are just as bad as the guys. I've seen bj videos going around which were sent by women. On the other hand not a week goes by where I dont see emails about some hot bird. Last week it was Swedish babe's because of the match and all.

Santa Claus

zabbo wrote:

The problem I have as a Sys Admin, is that people will use their work email address to signup for newsletters, purchasing online etc.

If they could use a personal email address(yahoo/gmail etc.) I'd be quite happy.

It's sad to say but only 50-60% of our emails are work related, despite many warnings.

A few employee's are walking a tight rope at the moment.

Women i find are the worst, with sending video emails of sexual acts.

I'd imagine most people do this because access to personal email address is blocked n a lot of companies with programs such as websense.

Sleipnir

Santa Claus wrote:

I'd imagine most people do this because access to personal email address is blocked n a lot of companies with programs such as websense.

Of course! I'd say about 40-60% of corporate email is non-work related. I'd would also speculate that 40-60% of employee's time in work is non work related!

Nobody has a problem with people using work to chat with their friends so long as it's not excessive. Transmitting porn just ain't on though and if you do it, this is what can happen.

I'm a sysadmin in a financial services company and I've seen people look at porn i.e. I've seen it on their monitors! I know it gets in but management decided that they didn't want to piss off the staff by being to restrictive!
e.g. we allow powerpoint and also jpgs. This is because so many people use jpgs legitimately for signatures etc.

zAbbo

We block Powerpoint and wmv embeds.

I've openly witnessed it as well, and was asked to 'have a look at dis...'

Fortunately a productive few years in colllege, means I've more or less seen it all before.

Santa Claus

zabbo wrote:

Fortunately a productive few years in colllege, means I've more or less seen it all before.

Plus, as a sysadmin you can interecept all the good stuff at the mailserver

TerrorFirmer

In my workplace more then half the internal emails are non-work related.....nothing is blocked either, wmv, avi, jpg, powerpoint, everything works

I'm not complaining though....but that said I've never seen porn passed around or even anything of a suggestive sexual nature for that matter, I can't believe how anyone could feel THAT comfortable in their workplace to feel they were safe using their work email for that sort of thing?

Stark

Stupid guys.

You can see how it would all start out though. You have a funny joke/picture/video which you decide to send to your best mate in work thinking "I'm not going to get into trouble for sending it to him, he'll think it's hillarious." Problem is he'll send it to a few of his mates who'll send it to a few of theirs. Somewhere along the line, it'll hit some dozy cow who'll stick on a "forward this to 10 of your mates" line at the end, the law of exponential dozy cattle accumulation kicks in and before you know it, it's everywhere.

And they'll all have your e-mail address listed in the original forward headers. Bye bye job.

Red Alert

thank god you sysadmins who posted here seem sound enough. can't stand the "i enforce the rules with zeal and love it" types.

bbbbb

Red Alert wrote:

thank god you sysadmins who posted here seem sound enough. can't stand the "i enforce the rules with zeal and love it" types.

Except of course when they're trying to catch the bosses who out sourced them

Not the first time this kind of thing has happened, just usually doesn't make the news. I can understand why the employer & employee would want it that way...

juddd

I work for a very large company and they have strick rules for surfing the web, but if the were to sack those who surfed the web for personal use they would have to sack 90% of their workforce, nearly everyone in work uses the internet for personal use, in fairness alot of people are very responsible with the sites they visit and do not use their work e-mail for their own personal use, and another lot of people download games to play, use the companies e-mail as if it was their own and download betting games and so on, loads of p.c's in this company have pop-ups popping up all over the place even without surfing the net and it is clogging up the p.c making it un-usable and they start complaing that the p.c is tooo slooowwww, mostly these people do not own their own p.c or have access to the net outside of work and understand very little about malware, addware and viruses and all that jargon, but these people could get into serious trouble with the company if an investigation comes along.
I feel there should be a certain tolerance for people who surf the web in work and are very responsible about the sites they visit and just check their e-mail maybe once or twice or do a bit of banking or book a holiday...I really don't see the harm....sure a company will say it's costing them money.....this is only mickey mouse money stuck in a spread sheet pumping out barley accurate statistics, if the company has high speed access then it should let their employees use it in a responsible fashion and need to be shown what to do and not to do when surfing and to only visit reputable sites and that any porn, violence, downloading of certain types of files will be investigated and dealt with in a fair and deadly serious manner.

And to those who download games, videos, music and infect p.c's with addware etc. and use the companies email as their own should be dealt with using the standard 3 warning system as this would show the user and the rest of the staff that the comapny is deadly serious and will not tolerate this kind of abuse of a very useful tool.
Sure they could sack them straight away, but that to me is not fair as the person involved should be given the chance to improve their habits when browsing and maybe they need to be sat down with someone from I.T to be instructed about the rights and wrongs of internet use and they would have to sign a document stating that they have been shown and instructed about the companies policy on internet usage.....phew.:p

Stark

Muppets like that are given tightly locked down machines where I work. If you have half a brain, you get an unrestricted PC.

leeroybrown

juddd wrote:

Sure they could sack them straight away, but that to me is not fair as the person involved should be given the chance to improve their habits when browsing and maybe they need to be sat down with someone from I.T to be instructed about the rights and wrongs of internet use and they would have to sign a document stating that they have been shown and instructed about the companies policy on internet usage.....phew.:p

Any large company would take it very seriously when their name and reputation is being tarnished by staff who are sending out pornographic e-mails including in the Merrill Lynch case to some clients. In this case they probably decided to put their foot down and got rid of anyone they didn't have a strong reason to keep.

I'm reminded of a situation where someone I know who was working in the financial sector was contacted by head office telling him that one of his staff had sent a number of e-mails containing some profane language from her work e-mail account. He was told to give her an official warning and to tell her that if it happened again that she would probably end up without a job. This was for four or five words in a few e-mails to a friend. They tend to take this kind of thing extremely serious.

Asok

HavoK wrote:

In my workplace more then half the internal emails are non-work related.....nothing is blocked either, wmv, avi, jpg, powerpoint, everything works

I'm not complaining though....but that said I've never seen porn passed around or even anything of a suggestive sexual nature for that matter, I can't believe how anyone could feel THAT comfortable in their workplace to feel they were safe using their work email for that sort of thing?

Hehe it was actually in your building that I had those 3 in my earlier post. There is full logs kept on what the e-mail contains in there and an actual webusage monitoring system.....its just no-one gives a toss lol

Heinrich

Rcuomo wrote:

yea i agree with the above. Employers should allow limited personal use - obviously no porn or whatever but i find if you are allowed to have some personal use, you're productive in the long run rather then all work, work, work which is just de-motivating.

and heinrich, you need to lighten up....

If someone is doing something that they would not be willing to do with their manager/boss standing beside them then they shouldn't be doing it.

I would be more "lightened up" than most because I go along with the above quote. No unnecessary risks leave me with a free mind.

Stark

Previous and current managers that I've had all knew/know I use the internet for both work and personal stuff (within reason). None of them gave/give a **** so long as I do my job to a high standard. Some people aren't obsessed with accounting for each individual minute of the day.

Our man in Havana

Even the DVLA has problems. 14 Fired as porn goes viral at the DVLA

tricky D

This wasn't based on a few emails, there was an investigation done over months. Tonnes of stuff was reviewed, contextualised and rated with lawyers. It was v explicit stuff. They were idiots, they got fired.

Back in my sys admin days, we would casually inform offenders about the logging and tell them to do it at home, stoopid. We also would provide them with a list of some decent pron sites. Usually got them onside and off-site. Other personal use, fine mostly unless in the way of work. Commonsense really

parsi

Where I work we block most attachments and have fairly restricted browsing. Some of the stuff that gets stripped is shocking (some is funny) and in a few cases we have blocked certain senders. I have seen porn being sent from an organisation that dealt with children and which one would have expected to be "wholesome".

So many of these messages come through with pages and pages of headers and sigs detailing exactly where people work.. it amazes me that people don't snip before posting.

Our man in Havana

People are stupid.