New phishing scam targeting KU students

Kingston students have been targeted by scammers pretending to be university staff, in an attempt to get them to reveal their bank details.

Several students have been contacted and told their student cards have been used in an attempt to set up student bank accounts and their finances are at risk. The scammers used unknown numbers.

Kingston Biomedical student, Wiktoria Maszke said: “I got a phone call on Thursday.

“He was saying he worked for the uni and was head of finance, and if I wasn’t sure I could look him up. He basically kept reassuring me and it was really convincing because he knew a lot about Kingston and the local area, even the clubs we go to.”

Maske said that he went on to tell her that somebody was trying to buy PRYZM tickets off her bank account whilst at university because they were using campus Wi-Fi.

“He said to protect my money I needed to open a Revolut account and transfer a thousand pounds into it.”

After speaking with housemates and other friends who had also received phone calls, she realised it was a fraudulent call and contacted the university.

A Kingston University spokesperson said: “We want to keep all our university community safe when they’re online so as soon as our IT services were informed of these incidents, we took the necessary steps to raise awareness among our students and provided them with guidance on staying safe online.

“Students are unfortunately often targeted by criminals and these cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated with the evolution of technologies and AI tools.

“The University will never contact a student to request the transfers of funds to another bank account so any requests as such should not be acted upon or engaged with.”

Last year alone authorities manage to stop £2.9 billion from being scammed out of students who had fallen victim to phishing or “smishing” scams, according to figures from the Student Loans Company. 

If you feel as if you have been the target of a phishing scam at Kingston University, contact it-security@kingston.ac.uk with all relevant details.

For additional support in cyber security and data protection students can visit the dedicated page on MyKingston at: https://kingstonuniversity.sharepoint.com/sites/mykingston/myuni/randr/data-protection.