Services

News

Links

Det John Haswell Named 
May Employee of the Month
for Cyber-crime investigation
 

The Natick Police Department recently received a Thank You from a company located in Natick that had been the victim of several different forms of harassment from a former employee. This employee had been let go because of economic reasons. The company had tried its best to give him enough time to locate another job and provided a financial package as best they could. Shortly after the employee was let go, and after he had verbally assaulted the owner in front of other employees, the company began experiencing a large volume of unsolicited mail, threatening e-mail’s, business contacts were being harassed and some attempts made to steal clients away. One package to the owner was mailed from his hometown indicating that the sender was close by.

Detective Haswell began a very long and difficult investigation trying to trace down the origin of the mail and e-mails. Detective Haswell was able to trace the e-mail’s back to several public computer locations that the suspect had ties to but because of the large volume of e-mail’s sent in the country today they are only held in the servers for a short period of time before being deleted, often before a court order can be obtained to release the senders information.

Detective Haswell was finally able to obtain a video surveillance tape from Kinko’s in Attleboro, the suspects home town, that showed him on the computer at the same time an e-mail was being sent to the company. This along with other background information gathered from former employers who had experienced similar problems were presented to the suspect when he was questioned with a lawyer present. He immediately confessed before his lawyer could tell him to stop.

The suspect was charged with multiple counts of criminal harassment, identity fraud, stalking and threats. The company has not experienced any further problems.  The criminal case is pending in Natick District Court. Civil suits filed by the suspect against the company will be dropped or have already been dismissed.

For his expertise with computers, dedication and persistence, Detective John Haswell is hereby commended and named Employee of the Month for May 2002.

Dennis R. Mannix
Chief of Police