The college has seen an increase in gift card scam emails that mostly target employees, according to Chris Norris, Middlebury’s director of information security, risk and compliance, in his scam alert on Sept. 21. The alert was in response to 28 messages sent the same day from an icloud.com address with no subject line, with five delivered and 23 filtered by standard email security controls or sent to the “quarantine” or “junk mail” folders, according to Norris.
The gift card scam emails are designed to trick people into purchasing gift cards and disclosing the number and PIN of the cards so that scammers may gain access to the amount available in the gift cards.
“This particular variant seems to be focused on our employees, using external email addresses (mostly gmail), first inquiring about a person’s availability to perform a task and eventually leading to a request to purchase gift cards for others,” Norris wrote in the scam alert sent out from the Middlebury Information Technology Services (ITS) email.
The Campus reached out to seven employees who are managers or supervisors across different departments to ask if they or their colleagues had received said emails. Jodie Keith, manager of support services, said she has not received any phishing emails.
“Fortunately, I do not believe I have received any of the email scams we have been warned about. I…
