Good morning.

This week I am starting early because I need to tell you about a current threat for which I have been receiving many questions. While the emails have been sent to many members of the Institute’s faculty and staff, which would include grad students who are employed by the Institute, I’m not certain if other students have received it. PLEASE share this with all of your students so they are informed about this threat!

Current Threat

• Student Benefit Check (phishing emails)     
  • The sender varies, but two that I am seeing are Schuelerfirma <Schuelerfirma[@]klara-oppenheimer-schule.de> and Locomoteur 1B <locomoteur.1b[@]silva-medical.be>.
  • Subject is either Grant Benefit or Student Benefit Check.
  • The message is the same for both addresses and subjects.
  • The message begins with “Dear Qualified Student,” but the recipients who have forwarded these emails to me are not students.
  • The message says that your “2024 student benefit check has been approved by the College Board and payment is set to be released.”
  • The message also states that this is not a loan and you will not be required to pay back the money.
  • The message requests personal information.
  • The message says that you should not reply to the email, but instead send information (preferably using your personal email) to the contact person listed, and that contact on all the emails is shown as Eric Mandoza Cullen with a Gmail address.
  • The message never says which student college board is giving out this money, which is definitely a sign of a scam.
  • The main portion of the message appears to be a screenshot that has been copied and pasted into the mass email.
  • And finally, the message ends with two statements, one in French and one in Dutch, stating that any personal data processed must meet GDPR regulations. (GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation on information privacy in the European Union.)
  • If you have received any email like this, please report it using Reporting Phishing Attempts and Other Email Scams.

Thanks for all you do to protect the Institute and its data, such as informing me when you receive emails like this one. Please let me know anytime you have questions, concerns, or potential security problems.

Have a great week!

Sandy

Important Note: Thank you so much for sharing these e-newsletters with family, friends, clients, students, and anyone else who may benefit from the information. I would like to stress that you should keep your students in mind, as non-employee students will not get this information without someone sharing. If anyone else has an email group for students who are not employees of your department, please let me know what that address is and I can include it. I do this as a blind copy so student names and addresses will not show up!