On February 4th, 2021 at 11:05 pm a mass email was sent out from a person who claimed to be the assistant to the Nigerian prince. The email was sent to roughly 350 PUSD (Pleasanton Unified School District) students with birthdays ranging from October to February. 

First and foremost Nigeria does not have a prince, since they are a republic and hold elections much like the United States of America. The email seems like a harmless prank, but it is always important to protect one’s self from possible phishing attacks. 

“So when a phishing attack occurs in multiple parts the first one is your ‘bait’ to get someone attracted, then the second one is to lure them in further, and the third is the gain money,” said Shawn Hensger a parent of two PUSD students and head of IT for a local tech business. 

Furthermore, these attacks are widely used, especially fraudulently to gain monetary support from people. 

“Americans lost $703,000 last year to these types of frauds, according to a new report by ADT Security Services” according to a CNBC article in 2019. Link to the article. 

Only a few minutes later some PUSD students responded sarcastically making light of the peculiar situation. Around 11:15 Jeanette D’Addabbo alerted the proper administrator and teachers.

“My immediate reaction to the email was that it must have been a prank from someone in PUSD, so I reported it to Mr. Mather, Mrs. Suto, and Mrs. Marek,” said Jeanette D’Addabbo (‘22). 

Later around 11:25 pm a few of the student’s emails were suspended for the night. There are also many speculations about who it possibly could have been, but nothing is known yet. 

“I have no idea who did it, but I suspect someone in Cyber Security because these are the skills people learn to protect themselves from,” said Joseph Hensger (‘22). 

After some research, it has been revealed that the account’s name is impersonating the semi-famous Youtuber/Twitch who goes by CallMeCarson. Furthermore, the profile picture is from CallMeCarson’s Instagram account and has been widely used on recent pop culture news. 

There is also significance to the numbers in the email address “1917”. Around the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 CallMeCarson has been accused of ‘grooming’ and sexting teenage girls. For more information on this here is the link to the AVT article. Therefore the 17 signifies the age the girl who he allegedly “groomed” was and his age at the time, 19. 

“I suspect that the person who emailed us was able to retrieve our emails is from the leadership reminder that came out earlier today regarding birthdays treat pick-ups. It’s probably not someone from Cyber Security because they did not BCC [or hide] the emails” said D’Addabbo (‘22).