This archive report was first published on 12 July 2019.
On Wednesday, minor league hockey fans received a flurry of unexpected push notifications from the American Hockey League app. The alerts were not about off-season news or updates about their favorite teams, but rather a bizarre demand for a $6,000 payment from a man named Stewart Zimmel.
According to reports, the notifications read: 'Stewart Zimmel. Since I have no way to contact you are you owe me nearly $6,000 I would ask you to contact me about payment.' The message was sent to users in at least three separate alerts and quickly became a talking point among hockey fans on social media.
Users who opened the app on Wednesday saw a March 2017 conversation between Mr. Zimmel and Ian Bowman, a contractor for HockeyTech. In that exchange, Mr. Zimmel told Mr. Bowman he would 'punch you in the throat,' putting the threat in quotation marks and following it up with a smiley face.
It was later revealed that Mr. Bowman had sent the messages as a test, but they were meant to go only to his and Mr. Zimmel's devices, not to all app users. Mr. Bowman estimated that the messages went out to roughly 30,000 app users.
Jason Chaimovitch, the American Hockey League's vice president for communications, said that the app had never been misused before, and that the league was working with HockeyTech to ensure it would never happen again.
By the end of the drama, the league had sent out an apology for the embarrassing moment.
