“Dean Hides Author’s Identity” Phishing Email

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 18:24:09 -0500
notice

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.