Grant Gross
Senior Writer

Utah man charged with intercepting employer e-mail

news
Aug 10, 20062 mins

Man faces up to 15 years in prison for allegedly intercepting his former bosses' e-mail

A Salt Lake City man faces up to 15 years in prison for allegedly intercepting the e-mail of two of his former bosses, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

William K. Dobson, 55, is charged with surreptitiously accessing the e-mail system of a Utah technology firm after he left the company. He has been indicted on two counts of intercepting electronic communications and one count of illegally obtaining information from a protected computer, the DOJ announced late Wednesday. The DOJ did not release the name of Dobson’s former employer.

After Dobson left the company over business and financial disagreements, he accessed the company’s e-mail system twice to program it to send e-mail to an unauthorized inbox he created on the company’s system, the DOJ said. Dobson allegedly routed the e-mail of the company’s chief executive officer and its vice president of engineering to this inbox.

He programmed his home computer to download the e-mail for longer than a month, until the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation searched his home in connection with the investigation, the DOJ said.

Dobson allegedly read many of the e-mail messages, containing both business and personal information, the DOJ said.

If convicted, Dobson faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and restitution to the victims.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

More from this author