In light of the volume of fradulent/scam emails that have been coming through and the fact that there are some students, faculty, and staff who are falling victim to them, we’ve setup this page to educate the campus community about these scams.
Though the vast majority of these messages are blocked or placed in your Junk folder, when hundreds of thousands are sent, some eventually get through.
Most of these scams are ‘phishing’ scams. Phishing is a type of scam where criminals try to get you to give them personal data such as usernames & passwords, social security numbers, financial information, etc. There are a few ways that they try to scam you and these are a few things to look out for:
“Verify your account” or “If you don’t respond within 48 hours your account will be closed”
These are the type of things that the scammers use to get you to respond. If an email asks you to verify your account to prevent it from being closed, locked, deleted, etc then you should be suspicious – especially if the message asks you reply with your password, or asks you to go to a website to verify some information. If you receive such a message, send it to phishing@newpaltz.edu and we will do our best to prevent similar messages from getting through in the future.
The ONLY time we will ever ask you to verify anything is if you do not appear to be enrolled or employed by the college anymore. If this appears to be the case you’ll receive a notice letting you know your accounts will be closed. If you receive such an email and you are still enrolled all you have to do is reply and let us know one course you are enrolled in. If you receive such an email and you are still employed by the college, then all you need to is let us know who your supervisor is. That’s it – no passwords, no other information.