{"id":479,"date":"2005-01-02T23:23:18","date_gmt":"2005-01-03T05:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=479"},"modified":"2005-01-02T23:24:22","modified_gmt":"2005-01-03T05:24:22","slug":"man-charged-in-uk-tsunami-death-email-probe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Man Charged in UK Tsunami Death Email Probe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This man is just freakin&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/story.news.yahoo.com\/news?tmpl=story&#038;cid=575&#038;ncid=732&#038;e=3&#038;u=\/nm\/20050103\/wr_nm\/quake_britain_hoax_dc\">sick<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>British police said on Monday they had charged a man with sending hoax emails to relatives of people missing since the Asian tsunami, saying their loved ones had been confirmed dead.<\/p>\n<p>The hoaxer, claiming to be from the &#8220;Foreign Office Bureau&#8221; in Thailand, targeted people who had placed appeals for information about relatives and friends on the Web site of TV station Sky News.<\/p>\n<p>Police said a 40-year-old man from Lincolnshire in northeastern England was charged with malicious communication and causing a public nuisance.<\/p>\n<p>He was due to appear at a London court on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>On Sunday, officers seized computer equipment in a joint operation by London&#8217;s Metropolitan Police and Lincolnshire police.<\/p>\n<p>All the messages came from one bogus email address, ukgovfoffice@aol.com.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The British government would not use email to convey news of the death of a loved one,&#8221; police said. &#8220;Anyone receiving such an email should treat it with utmost caution.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sky News said it was &#8220;disgusted&#8221; at the abuse of the message board on its Web site and had contacted police as soon as it was alerted to the hoaxes.<\/p>\n<p>The death toll from the tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off western Indonesia a week ago, stood at almost 130,000 on Monday, including at least 40 Britons. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This man is just freakin&#8217; sick. British police said on Monday they had charged a man with sending hoax emails to relatives of people missing since the Asian tsunami, saying their loved ones had been confirmed dead. The hoaxer, claiming to be from the &#8220;Foreign Office Bureau&#8221; in Thailand, targeted people who had placed appeals [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}