An “Alert Carolina” message was sent to students, faculty, and staff on the UNC campus, on Wednesday, warning of a scam targeting college campuses.
According to the FBI, college students across the United States have been targeted to participate in work-from-home scams through emails to their school accounts that recruit them for payroll and/or human resource positions with fictitious companies.
Students are then asked to provide his/her bank account number to receive a deposit and then transfer a portion of the funds to another bank account, which is involved in the scam.
Likewise, university employees are receiving fraudulent e-mails indicating a change in their human resource status. Information from the employee is then used to access the employee’s official human resources account and alter direct deposit settings, diverting paychecks to the scammer’s account.
The FBI is recommending a few steps to protect yourself:
• If a job offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Never accept a job that requires the depositing of funds into your account and wiring them to different accounts.
• Look for poor use of the English language in e-mails such as incorrect grammar, capitalization, and tenses. Many of the scammers who send these messages are not native English speakers.
• Never provide credentials of any kind such as bank account information, login names, passwords, or any other identifying information in response to a recruitment e-mail.
• Forward suspected e-mails to the University’s IT personnel and tell your friends to be on the lookout for the scam.
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