The director of a Sioux City museum wants everyone to know he’s not in trouble and he wasn’t robbed overseas.

Larry Finley, director of the Mid America Museum of Aviation and Transportation, says he was in a meeting in Sioux City yesterday when something unusual happened.

Finley says, “Several people around the table received simultaneous emails supposedly from me, stating that I was mugged in a hotel in the Ukraine and that I needed money to pay the hotel bill, otherwise, they wouldn’t let me out of the hotel.”

At least two of Finley’s email accounts were hacked. He received a text from his daughter to make sure he was still in Sioux City.

Finley says he’ll take steps to improve security on his accounts and he notes, everyone who uses email can learn a lesson from his experience.

“It just shows that anybody can be hacked at any time,” he says. “You just have to watch who you ‘friend’ and communicate with and whether or not you open certain emails when you do not know who the email is actually from.”

Finley advises all of his friends to delete the emails that appear to be from him and not to open them.

By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City