Protect Yourself from Phishing and Email Scams
Western is being assaulted more than ever by criminals seeking to steal information and commit financial crimes. Please delete these messages if you receive them. These types of incidents include:
- Impersonations of university management and faculty
- Offering refunds or fake advertisements
- Demanding that you verify your account information
- Pressuring you into buying gift cards and sharing the numbers off the back of the card
- Offering jobs to students that are too good to be true
- Extortion emails asking recipients to pay criminals in Bitcoin
Most of these problems start with a phishing email. Many of the successful phishing attempts result in a compromised user identity. Any emails in an account that is compromised could fall into the hands of hackers. This may include confidential information such as user’s names, passwords, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, license numbers, addresses, and more.
If you would like to learn more about phishing and how to protect yourself, please review the security pages on the ATUS Help Desk website. For those of you who are cautious about clicking links in emails (BTW, good for you), you can enter atus.wwu.edu into your browser and click the Security link.
Particularly helpful links from that page include:
How to Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails
Examples of Phishing Attempts received by Western
Report a Phishing Scam - it is very helpful to report phishing scams because it trains our protection algorithms and makes our email safer.