Six months after Nidhi Razdan, a famous television journalist and news anchor, revealed on social media that she would leave NDTV to take up a teaching job at Harvard University, she disclosed that she had been the target of a sophisticated phishing attack. In June 2020, the senior journalist who has been working on TV for over two decades was told that she will be posted as Associate Professor. But after multiple delays in the posting and “administrative anomalies” in the process, she reached out to Harvard University, only to find out that she was scammed.
On her official Twitter account, Nidhi shared that she had started training for the new assignment last year, which was supposed to begin in September 2020, but was later told that Harvard classes would begin in January 2021 due to the continuing pandemic. “I began to notice a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me, along with these delays,” Nidhi said.
“At first, I had dismissed these anomalies as being reflective of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic, but recently the representations being made to me were of an even more disquieting nature. As a result, I reached out to senior authorities at Harvard University for clarity. Upon their request, I shared some of the correspondence that I believed I had received from the University,” Nidhi said in a statement issued on Twitter on Friday.
This is when she realised that she had become a victim of a “sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack.”
“I did not, in fact, receive an offer by Harvard University to join their faculty as an Associate Professor of Journalism. The perpetrators of this attack used clever forgeries and misrepresentations to obtain access to my personal data and communications and may have also gained access to my devices and my email/social media accounts,” Nidhi said in her statement.
Nidhi shared that she has filed a complaint with the police and has provided them with all the relevant documentary evidence. “I have requested them to take immediate steps to identify, apprehend and prosecute the perpetrators of this abominable attack. Separately, I have written to the Harvard University authorities and urged them to take the matter seriously,” she said.
Nidhi added that she has also written to individuals and organizations with whom I have been in touch with over the past few months to keep them informed. “I hope that the police are able to get to the bottom of this attack on me at the earliest and help me bring this unsavoury incident to a swift end,” Nidhi added.
Phishing scams are normally frauds committed by sending emails or correspondence by claiming to be from a certain agency or business to deceive individuals into sharing sensitive information.
Job scams are prevalent in India, especially on famous sites such as Naukri.com and, indeed, where fake job offers are posted and applicants are approached pretending to be from the job site and then made to pay
In such cases, scam suspects use personal information to deceive individuals into thinking that their deals are legitimate, with their mode of contact being surprisingly close to that of the work site or the organization, such as email IDs.
Several comments have been flooding in, “Hope they catch anyone responsible for this scam.” It was, I presume, a high degree of sophistry. Especially if a http://Harvard.edu account was used,” author Aparna Jain wrote.
