'Are You Available??' Email Scam

Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2019

Hello,

Faculty and staff around the campus have been receiving emails in which the message body of the email reads “Are you available???” or a similar opening query.  These messages are a scam. Do not respond to them. These messages will appear to come from your supervisor or a colleague. The perpetrators of this scam are spoofing the "sent from" name in the email message. For example, the "sent from" name might read Jane Doe, but the email address will read <doe.jane@gmail.com> instead of the standard CSUSM email address of <jdoe@csusm.edu>. If you respond to these messages, they will most often ask you to purchase some form of transferrable currency, usually a gift card, in an attempt to scam you out of your money.

You can tell that these are a scam message because they come from non-campus or private email addresses like @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @outlook.com, @yahoo.com, etc., but the "sent from" name will be someone you know who works on our campus. The messages that we have confirmed as scams have appeared to have come from individuals ranging from department chairs to campus administration.

If you receive one of these messages, or any other suspected phishing message, please forward the message as an attachment to abuse@csusm.edu.

Thank you,

CSUSM Information Security Office

infosec@csusm.edu

csusm.edu/security