Two of our faculty members, Kongolo and Nkonge, are in Senegal giving courses in our Masters of Leadership program. While there, they visited a cyber cafe to check their email.
Somehow their email address and passwords were pirated along with their address list. People on their list are now getting fake emails from them saying that they are stranded in London and could money be sent by Western Union. This is a scam.
Both Kongolo and Nkonge are getting new email addresses.
Just because an email "looks" like it comes from a friend does not mean it really does. Criminals can "spoof" the email address.
ReplyDeleteBest practice: never click on links in an email message -- they can go to a malicious web page.
Also ... the computers involved may have been infected with a "keystroke logger" -- software that captures names and passwords and anythign else you type, then sends it to the criminals.
I strongly recommend that if a personal laptop was computer, that computer should be immediately scanned for viruses, spyware, and "rootkits" with updated antivirus and antispyware software. In the worst cases, computers may need to be reformatted and all software installed from scratch.
-- Bruce