Other variations of the subject line have also been seen.
This is a job scam email that is impersonating UVic, specifically the Department of History. There are several red flags that indicate that this offer is not legitimate:
- The sender is not from UVic–it’s a Gmail address. Unsolicited job offers from free email providers should always be viewed with suspicion.
- The capital I’s in the sender display name may look wonky depending on your mail app’s font. That’s because the scammer is actually using lowercase l’s.
- The greeting is impersonal and awkwardly worded.
- There are a few grammatical errors.
- The high amount of weekly pay for a small amount of remote work is too good to be true. Describing an urgent need for students is also suspicious.
- The email asks you to reply with your personal information via text message to get more information about the supposed job.
- The phone number provided doesn’t use a local area code–the area code in the example below is for Southern California!
If you got this email, do not reply to the scammer and definitely do not send your personal information or contact information to their email address or phone number (doing the latter might also incur a charge for long-distance SMS). If you did, contact the Computer Help Desk for assistance.
Update 2022-11-04: we have also seen some later variants of this scam that have added UVic Edge branding to make the emails look more polished and legitimate. The red flags above still apply, including the use of a (different) non-local phone number.
