Norfolk medical secretary gets hoax email 150,000 times

A medical secretary said her email account was bombarded with the same message 150,000 times in a week, leaving her unable to do her job.

Cressida Sadler said the emails, purporting to be from gift company MenKind, meant she could not use the system for Spire Hospital in Norwich.

"It was absolutely ridiculous, and so stressful," she said.

Surrey-based MenKind, which is investigating, said it believed the emails were sent by an illicit account.

Mrs Sadler logged on at home in Besthorpe, near Attleborough, Norfolk, after New Year and found new messages from patients and consultants, as expected, in her BT email account, which she uses for work.

She also had more than 7,000 duplicate emails that appeared to be from MenKind, apologising for a delay in delivery.

"They were still arriving, every two or three seconds. I just couldn't believe it," she said.

"I was being bombarded and it was really slowing up the process and eventually caused my computer to crash.

"I couldn't email out; nobody could email in."

She said it was very stressful as the private hospital's patients were paying for a service and expected their GP to have their documents within 48 hours.

"BT tech support said they couldn't work out what the glitch was, and couldn't believe it. They said they hadn't heard of anything quite like it," she said.

Mrs Sadler managed to send emails via a protracted process that took several minutes for each message, but could not receive emails for a week.

She believes she received about 150,000 copies of the message, which stopped after a week, with many thousands still needing to be deleted from her inbox.

MenKind said it had sent Ms Sadler marketing emails at the end of 2021, but the thousands of emails had not been sent by its platform, and it had not had a data breach.

"I am sorry that Ms Sadler received a number of illicit, Menkind-branded emails," said Fred Prego, director of digital marketing.

"We do not believe these emails were sent by us... as a measure of precaution we deactivated Ms Sadler's email account.

"I would be more than happy to help Ms Sadler get to the bottom of this issue."

A BT spokesperson said: "We're sorry to hear about Ms Sadler's experience and we're in contact to investigate further.

"We take the security of our customers' accounts very seriously and provide lots of information and advice on how to protect yourself online, including information on how to deal with email spam."

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