“How are you doing? Hope all is well with you and family, I know this might be a surprise to you but I am sorry I didn’t inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar. I need a favor from you because I misplaced my wallet…”
These requests for “emergency” funds are often what lead people straight into online scams, according to a forum thread on email scams.
To raise awareness of scams like these, Boston University’s Information Services & Technology brought National Security Awareness Week to campus with its first Information Security Awareness Week.
While October has been nationally recognized as Information Security Awareness Month for the past eight years, Quinn Shamblin, Executive Director of Information Security, said this is the first year that Boston University is hosting its own awareness campaign.
His first year as executive director of information security, Shamblin said he pushed for BU to participate in the national campaign to inform students about the nature of internet and phone scams. The only way to prevent people from falling prey to these crimes, he said, is through awareness.
“People like me have been telling everyone for years about the various online attacks and ways to prevent them, and so the bad guys are trying other tactics too,” Shamblin said.
The department plans to hold its third document-shredding event this week on Thursday from 9 a.m. to noon in the Babcock Lot, Shamblin said. The department has already shredded nearly two tons of paper.
Online scams are one of the most revenue-generating activities for criminals, Shamblin said.
“Quite simply, your personal information is money in the hands of criminals who misuse it,” he said. “The amount of money being made through phishing scams, fraudulent websites and financial Trojans like Zeus, SpyEye and URLzone is staggering and it is drawing significant attention from the criminal element.”
Shamblin said that over the last five years, the Russian mafia has made more money from “crime-ware,” or malware designed to steal money, than from drug dealing, gun running and prostitution combined.
Information Security has also sent school-wide emails throughout the week that include warnings about various online scams and tips on how to prevent them. In an email sent to students Wednesday, Shamblin wrote that students should set a password to their smart phones and set it to lock automatically after five minutes.
“[If] someone finds your phone and there is no password on it, they get instant access to your email and can really mess with you if they want,” he said.
Shamblin said students should never submit their passwords to confirm any account standings or information, particularly for any BU accounts.
“Don’t ever give your password to anyone. The only people who will ask for your password are the criminals,” he said.
Shamblin said that more recent scams have involved phone calls from sources pretending to be people’s credit card companies or banks who claim to have problems with the phone owner’s account. These sources ask people to “verify” names and passwords.
“This is just the same old ‘tell me your password’ scam we have been seeing in email for 20 years being replayed through the phone, but because it is via phone, people are falling for it,” he said.
Fior Fabian, a junior in the College of Communication, said that she password protects everything she can.
“I like making sure only I have access to my private files and accounts. And I have a lot of friends who like messing with my accounts for fun,” Fabian said.
COM sophomore Madeline Walsh, however, said that she does not have a password set for her laptop or her phone.
“I’m not concerned to the point where I think someone can break into my computer,” she said.
College of Engineering sophomore Laura Muller said she believes that college students are less prone to get hacked or scammed.
“I just think that it’s part of our generation. We’re more technologically literate. Like, you know if you don’t log out of your Amazon account, you’ll have your credit card information stolen,” Windmuller said.
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Thanks for the heads-up! This helps a lot now that this scam has resurfaced again. Scams never really grow old. They might disappear for a while and then come back again. People need to be vigilant at all times.
That request for an emergency fund is termed as grandparent scam and mostly targets senior citizens. A scammer posing as a grandson or a relative calls random numbers until they get an elderly on the other line. Then they go about putting up a good story and scam money out of the unsuspecting distressed victim and I think this is the most terrible scam. and there’s a lot of this reported to the telephone scams watchdog site http://www.callercenter.com. I think people prefer the site over the others because it’s free and most visited.