Mom Sent Cease And Desist From Former Employer Over Company Emails

Location: Arizona

Today my mom received a cease and desist from her former employer's lawyer claiming that she accessed and sent herself employee information after her termination date. She was fired from this position in July. They are asking her to write a letter stating that she has deleted all relevant employee information by this Friday (October 10th).

The issue gets complicated because she admittedly did access her employee email a few days after she was terminated, but ONLY sent herself emails that pertained to her, such as an insurance issue and some personal emails. No other employee data was accessed.

Some possible relevant information:

She was let go from the company for a few reasons, the biggest one we believe to be is because she was unwilling to take a pay cut. When an issue arose regarding payroll she became the fall guy even though in that specific instance it was not her fault, and she was fired.

She received both a severance and unemployment benefits up until recently due to this termination.

The company is under audit due to non-payment to employees and other tax issues, which began prior to my mom starting at the company. My mom was the sole payroll manager and was aware of multiple violations the company was committing. The owner was in charge of these decisions and declined to fix them. She planned to contact the department of labor but feared retaliation while she was still receiving her severance.

Her accounts were hacked earlier this month stemming from a phishing link. They started with her Amazon account but she was locked out of her Indeed as well. The link was a fake zoom link for a job interview. (Likely irrelevant due to timing but we are still discovering accounts they've attempted to or have gained access to.)

The possible smoking gun, which I admit puts her in a bad place on top of her accessing her email after her termination, is she had a colleague download personal files she had on the work laptop (I know) onto a USB drive. My mom has no use for employee information and this is not a "company secrets" issue. The stuff on the USB was strictly personal files that were too large to send over email, and the colleague offered to take care of it for her as they terminated her and asked her to leave immediately.

She plans to speak to legal aid this week but with the deadline to respond for this Friday, we are unsure of what to do. We don't believe writing the letter admitting guilt is in her best interest, as she does not actually have any employee information. Any help is appreciated.