Robots and the Fire Horse – Digital Safety during Lunar New Year
This February, Digital Safety Officer, Ricarda, teamed up with Campus Security and Information Security colleagues to run scams and fraud awareness stalls for international students. We tied the stalls in with Lunar New Year due to a high number of scams currently directly targeting Chinese students in the UK. As it’s the year of the fire horse, the team couldn’t resist making a few cringe-worthy Firewall and Trojan Malware related puns.
Through these engaging conversations, the team spoke with a diverse group of students who had fallen prey to sophisticated scams. Many had been contacted by fraudsters posing as officials from the Foreign or Home Office, the Chinese Consulate, or even Police Scotland, using threatening tactics to extort money. These scams often involve stressful warnings of deportation or similar consequences.
Alarmingly, there have been reports of complex abduction schemes, where scammers demand ransoms by faking abductions, either by severing digital communication or coercing victims into taking fake abduction photos of themselves. By sharing these experiences and offering guidance, the team aimed to empower students with the knowledge to protect themselves from such threats and stay safe online.
Our advice is:
- First, take a deep breath! We understand that a threat to residence status is very stressful. But stress also lets you make rash and unconsidered decisions. Instead, take a moment, collect your thoughts, and ask yourself: does this call or email seem legit?
- Hang up and do not respond to the email directly. Instead, find the official number for the organisation a potential spammer pretends to contact you from. If they are actually representatives, they should have no problem with you getting in touch that way. Scammer, in turn, will likely attempt to keep you on the line.
- Report any suspicious activity.
- Pass emails to EdHelp (for students) or to is.skills@ed.ac.uk (for staff).
- Report phone calls or similar contact to campus security (their number is on the back of your university card), or directly contact Police Scotland.
Luckily, it was not all doom and gloom. We had a fantastic time getting to know more students from the Chine community at the University and even made friends with Levels cafe’s cat cleaning robot (let me know where I can get one for my home). Thank you to the Nucleus Building, the Business School, and especially the monthly MHSES Community Cafe for having us!
For more support, the Digital Safety, Wellbeing and Citizenship Hub has an entire page about Fraud and Scam protection, including specific support for Chinese students in English and simplified Chinese.
