When living in a world with sophisticated technology and intricate software, online scams have become more sophisticated and difficult to recognize.
It can be hard to discern if the email or phone call from your bank or the Canadian Revenue Agency are real or fake.
However, it is also important to educate people on how to detect when they are being scammed. Recently, MacEwan University in Edmonton fell victim to a phishing scam amounting to $11.8 million.
While universities are filled with smart and educated people, phishing and scamming have proven to become highly calculated and designed to slip the minds of smart individuals like students and university employees.
It is important to raise awareness about the frequency of scams and let people know that scams are not easily detected like previous years when the internet expanded. For example, earlier this year the University of Calgary sent out a series of fake phishing emails to its employees, in order to educate them about online scams.
Universities and other institutions with a lot of money are more likely to be targeted and therefore students and more importantly university staff should be trained and taught how to recognize it
Phishing scams now are not a questionable email asking you to donate money to a needy person, but are rather grammatically correct, and well thought-out ones.
