It has become a common scam for people to access public information on an organization's website and identify individuals who could have access to financial or administrative resources. By utilizing fake email addresses (i.e., school president, principal, etc.), these scammers will attempt to garner a response from various employees. They will ask you to purchase gift cards, wire money, give a credit card number, contact them about an urgent matter, etc. You should be immediately suspicious of any email regarding making a purchase, sending money, disclosing financial data, or urgently requesting a response.
Unfortunately, these are difficult to prevent since the senders change email addresses daily. If the IT department blocks a malicious email address, the scammers will quickly make a new account. The best course of action is to be vigilant in identifying these types of messages.
The most common attempts use an email address that is obviously fake and not actually from Dr. Gulley and other administrators such as "woodwardpres34@gmail. com" and "jonathan.merrill@my. com" and "dee.koscik.woodward.edu@gmail. com". In a more sophisticated attempt, the scammers use real email addresses to send the fake emails but the email address shown when replying will be fraudulent. For emails that are not unmistakably fraudulent, examining the contents of the email and wording used can assist in identifying possible scam attempts. One word subjects or in the body of the email are an example many of these communications use such as "Available?", "Can you talk?", etc.
Most Woodward employees now correctly identify these messages as fraudulent, mark them as spam, and delete them. This is the course of action we recommend and ask that you please keep up your diligence in scrutinizing the emails you receive. Additional information and tools to assist you in identifying these types of communications are below and if you ever have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out to the IT department.