Carolyn Gudmundson, a former program manager at Microsoft’s MSN division, has been sentenced to 22 months in prison for defrauding the company out of nearly $1 Million in fake domain name registration fees.
Between 2000 and 2004, Gudmundson submitted invoices with inflated charges for registration fees, billed the company for registrations that had already been paid, and ran a number of other scams on the side.
Gudmundson was also the listed contact for Passport.com during the Hotmail crash in 1999, which saw 60 million Internet users unable to access their email accounts because Microsoft failed to pay a $35 fee to renew the Passport.com domain name, which was needed for logins to Hotmail.
[via PCAdvisor.co.uk]
Note: Head on over to SeattlePi.com for more information including the court filing, Gudmondson’s letter of defense, and a post-ruling article by Todd Bishop, who was in court for the sentencing.
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