“Dean Hides Author’s Identity” Phishing Email
An Odd YouTube Related Scam Making The Rounds
Below is an example of a phishing email that has been reported to the Department of Information Technology (DoIT).
From: k chan <kkchan3275@aol.com> Date: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 Subject: For UMBC faculty/staff: Dean hides author's identity of his dissertation To: <@umbc.edu> Share with UMBC faculty/staff
Play this short you-tube clip: paste " hide, kam " in you-tube search bar to find it. You just can't make this up.
A new twist in academic dishonesty (make people think that one's dissertation was written by someone else). Crazy, shameful.
People write a decent dissertation, except him. LOL |
The phishing email below has the subject “For UMBC faculty/staff: Dean hides author's identity of his dissertation” and is from <kkchan3275@aol.com>. There are also similar versions of this scam sent from other email addresses, for example <ash.chen@yandex.com> and <chu.ben@yandex.com>.
Please note some of the grammatical mistakes in the message above, this can be a red flag for phishing email. Some other red flags are that the message is asking the user to share the message with other UMBC faculty and staff. Also, the email is not from a UMBC domain email address but instead is coming from AOL.
What to do now?
If you do receive this or a similar scam, please DO NOT respond any further or click on any URLs. If you have provided any banking or financial information, please notify your bank or financial institution immediately. If you have been sent a check, you should not attempt to cash or deposit it. If you have deposited a check already, please contact your bank and tell them that it may be part of a scam.
Whether or not you responded to the scam or not, please forward the message (with the email headers) to security@umbc.edu. We will also keep track of any other information you submit about the scammers, such as their phone numbers. If you were sent a check or other materials, please send pictures of it and the envelope they came in.
How do I forward full email headers?
https://wiki.umbc.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1867970
To read more articles published by DoIT Security please visit:
https://itsecurity.umbc.edu/critical/?tag=notice.
https://itsecurity.umbc.edu/home/covid-19-news/?tag=covid19
Posted: January 19, 2021, 6:24 PM