Job and Internship Phishing Schemes

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Job and Internship Phishing Schemes Targeting Penn Students

Image of Hiring Now sign

Work remotely! High pay! Flexible Hours!

Sound too good to be true?

You’re right.

 

College students have long been targets of job-related phishing schemes, particularly over the summer months. Recently, however, many universities, including Penn, have seen a dramatic increase in these campaigns, both in volume and sophistication, running throughout the school year.

Penn email systems are being regularly bombarded with scam emails with subjects like:

  • UNDERGRADUATE/GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT
  • UPENN STUDENT SERVICES ONLINE REMOTE WORK AVAILABLE
  • UPENN REMOTE INTERNSHIP

Some of the accompanying messages are fairly generic and easy to spot as fakes. Others have been customized for their audience, purporting to be from a real office of the University and impersonating members of Penn’s staff or faculty.

The scammers change the sender and subject lines of their messages frequently to elude spam filters and make their way into your inbox. But here are a couple of telltale signs to be on the lookout for:

  1. Sender address mismatch: Many phishing campaigns rely on free Gmail or compromised .edu accounts from overseas schools. Official Penn messages should only come from upenn.edu addresses. You should always check that the source of a message matches the display name and message content.

  2. Request for alternate contact: Beware if a message asks you to provide an “alternate email” or the sender wants to pivot to text or other communications app. Scammers often prefer to take the conversation elsewhere, away from the spam filters and other defenses of Penn email, someplace where their con might not be so easily detected. 

For more on how to identify phishing schemes and job scams see:

Phishing & Spear Phishing

Identifying Red Flags: A Guide to Avoiding Fraudulent Job Offers