Recent Scam Emails to UMD Students from Impersonators

Over the past several weeks, students have reported receiving email messages to their TERPmail and personal email addresses that appear to have been sent by faculty members at UMD with these or similar subject lines: “Interdisciplinary Research Project,” “Part Time Assistantship,” "Research Internship," and "Research Assistants Job Opportunity.” The unsolicited messages invite the student to work on a project to collect data online. The messages say that a weekly salary will be discussed, and ask for your personal information, including a non-UMD email address, in order to indicate your interest.

These messages have been forged to impersonate someone at the university, they were not sent by the person they claim to be from, and the job offer is a scam. The intent is to extort money during the application process, get the addressee to purchase cryptocurrency for the scammer, or to deposit bogus or fraudulent checks and send money on to the scammer.

Be suspicious of any offers for employment if you did not apply for or inquire about a job. One of the common factors in this and similar scams is that the recipient of the scam email was not pursuing the job that the scam email offers.

Red flags to watch out for:
The scammers running this fraud may request the recipient's assistance in a way that asks for either personal information or payments, or both. The following requests should all be considered red flags:

• Requests to deposit checks and spend or send back some or all of the money
  Check overpayment scams are a common way to fool someone into handing over money. In this version of the scam, the sender provides what seems to be a real check; your bank will credit you for some or all of the check, but when the check proves to be fake, you are stuck with the loss for whatever money you spent. Do not respond to requests to print or cash checks and then purchase gift cards or other items of value for a sender.
• Requests for payment, particularly prepaid cards or gift cards
  A real offer of employment or request for assistance from UMD faculty or staff should not ask you to spend money, particularly in the form of providing gift cards or prepaid credit cards to the person contacting you.

If you receive an email like this at your UMD or personal email address, do not respond. Mark the email as spam (learn how to mark a message as spam in Gmail) or delete it from your inbox.

DIT maintains a list of scams UMD is seeing, which contains more about this and other common scams.

If you have additional questions please contact the IT Service Desk.

-- Adapted from an email to all UMD students sent October 18, 2023 and signed by Gerry Sneeringer, Chief Information Security Officer --