July 28, 2008

Academics fooled by spam

For most of us, spam or fraudulent emails are normally something to do with helping out someone in Africa who has several million dollars to transfer, Viagra, or fake banks and in general, these mostly end up in the trash.

However, there is a growing new wave of emails, which are targeting the academics of the world and in many cases are proving to be a valuable source of cash for the people behind these emails. This is a new development in email fraud and can have devastating effects to the victims.

The emails are sent out to universities asking academics to send a few lines from their unpublished work in order to get international recognition. Once this has been done, the sting is attempted in two ways. First, they could be asked for money or more serious is the collecting of personal details for fraud.

Academics are warned to look for emails that come from free email accounts.

Source [THE]