Security News > 2021 > May > Walmart apologizes for offensive, racist registration emails
Walmart apologizes for a burst of offensive and racist Walmart.com registration emails sent to thousands of people yesterday.
Starting at approximately 2 AM EST yesterday, people worldwide began receiving new user registration emails from Walmart.com where the member name was a racist slur.
These registration emails were widespread, with my wife receiving one and many people on Twitter also reporting that they received them.
Today, Walmart sent an email apologizing to those who received the offensive emails and stated that they are updating their account sign-up process to prevent these issues in the future.
"I am reaching out to let you know we are very sorry that you received an offensive and unacceptable email. We discovered that someone outside of the company created false Walmart accounts with the intent to offend our customers. We are working to update the account sign-up process to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again," said Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside in an email people receiving the email.
It is not clear how these emails were sent out, but it is believed that someone took a list of email addresses and used it to create thousands of Walmart accounts with the racist member name.