Microsoft’s Former Domain Czar Sent to the Big House
Monday, October 20th, 2008A former program manager at Microsoft was sentenced in July to 22 months in prison for defrauding Microsoft out of approximately $1 million in falsified domain registration fees.
According to PC Advisor, Carol Gudmundson used her corporate American Express card to pay for domain registration fees — but she would then submit copies of invoices that showed inflated charges. She also billed Microsoft for domain registrations that had already been paid for.
Gudmundson got off easy; she could have received as much as 20 years in prison.
She had a history of domain “problems” with Microsoft. She was listed as the contact for Microsoft’s hotmail.com domain when it went offline in 1999. In that incident, about 60 million users were unable to access their hotmail e-mail accounts because the domain’s registration had not been renewed.