Voters Receive Email Threats to “Vote for Trump or Else”

Pro Democrat voters from Florida and Alaska revealed that they have received emails apparently sent from The Proud Boys website threatening to come after them if they do not vote for US President Trump. The Proud Boys is a right wing group and the designated hate group by a civil rights group. However, cybersecurity authorities show that the emails purportedly came from overseas servers located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Estonia.

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CBS News: CBS News shows the message originated from IP addresses linked to servers located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Estonia

Screenshot from CBS News

In a news report by CBS News, it revealed that Democratic voters in Alachua County, Florida, began receiving the email on Tuesday morning, and voters in Alaska and Arizona also reported receiving the message. Early voting began in Florida on Monday. The emails appeared to come from the right-wing group The Proud Boys, and showed a “from” address of [email protected].

While at first glance the email seems to come from an account under the domain of a website affiliated with The Proud Boys, a review of the source code embedded in seven emails reviewed by CBS News shows the message originated from IP addresses linked to servers located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Estonia. 

The IP addresses don’t establish that the senders are based in those countries, since the messages could have been routed through the servers from nearly anywhere, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. He noted that the messages were sent via a “cloud infrastructure provider in Saudi Arabia called ‘Saudi Executive Cloud.'”

Screenshot from CBS News