Scams targeting the UCLA Engineering community:
- June 10, 2019: We have been getting quite a few phishing attempts coming from scammers impersonating Chairs, Deans, and other faculty members requesting staff and other faculty for “Urgent Requests” to purchase certain types of gift cards so they could give these cards to their clients, family, etc. Almost 99% of the time, these messages will not be coming from whom they say they were. If you see these types of messages, please do not respond to the sender, forward a copy of the email to SEASnet Help Desk so we could confirm the identity and once we can confirm these to be fraudulent, we will block the email address from reaching others. Unfortunately, there is not much more we could do to prevent this since the process of creating a new fake email address would be very easy for scammers to do. More information could be found at the following link from the Federal Trade Commission regarding these types of scams: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/paying-scammers-gift-cards.
Scams targeting the general UCLA community: