A deluge of threatening messages have left partners and employees “terrified.”
By Raif Karerat
An accounting firm run by five partners of Indian descent is reeling after the office was suddenly inundated with threatening phone calls accusing them of being members of the Ku Klux Klan, an infamous American white supremacist hate group.
Unfortunately for the accounting firm K.K. Mehta — located in garden City, N.Y. and staffed primarily by employees of Indian descent — the firm’s phone number and email address were erroneously posted as part of activist group Anonymous’ highly publicized “leak” of Ku Klux Klan members.
“We don’t know anything about these people,” one partner told the Washington Post in a conference call with his attorney and one of the firm’s accountants on Tuesday. “We have nothing to do with all of this.”
While many of the phone calls being received by the firm are from the southern U.S. area codes, at least one was close by, from New York.
“It is a matter of concern when you have so many threatening phone calls, and some of them are local,” the partner said. The partner, who wished to remain unidentified for fear of further reprisal, is “terrified” that the threats against the firm could escalate.
Anonymous posted a pastebin file via Twitter on Nov. 1 claiming it contained as many as 1,000 phone numbers and e-mails of members of the Ku Klux Klan. The pastebin file was one of four posted online through an Anonymous-associated Twitter account, and all are apparently from the same source.
While the leak was widely hyped, the information contained in those files was unverified.
The accountant who helped to answer the firm’s phone calls the day following the leak told The Post that the office received at least 70 calls in 24 hours that were clearly in response to their number’s presence on that list in addition to an uncounted number of voicemail messages.
The partner had no clue how the firm ended up on the list, but surmised that it might have something to do with the double K’s at the start of the firm’s name.