Community Alert – Scam Emails

Campus Safety has been advised by multiple students that they have received an email offering employment by a professor from another institution. In the email the person states they got the student’s name from “the chamber of commerce connected to your institutional recruiting department.” These are scam emails.

Typically the scam works when the student responds to the email. The scammer then sends a check and asks the student to cash it and either forward most of the money or all of the money back to the scammer in some form (usually in gift cards). They use various reasons for requesting the check to be cashed. The check turns out to be a forgery and therefore the student is responsible for the amount cashed by their bank.

Things to consider:

• Does the email contain odd information – says you owe money that you are not aware of, got your name from a location you are not familiar with, looking for help with something you have no connection to?
• Is there a lack of punctuation, misspellings, sentence fragments, etc?
• Does the sender’s email address come from an institution or a general gmail or yahoo account?
• Research the person or institution and call for verification.
• If you are not sure about the content have a friend or family member review for a different perspective on the content.

Check out this link from the Federal Trade Commission for more information on avoiding fraud