Students cautioned about email scholarship offer
Though most scholarships are established to help students, USU administrators are telling students to be careful about emails advertising the Hazing Awareness Scholarship some
Students and faculty members have recently received emails about a new scholarship — the Hazing Awareness Scholarship — some concerned USU administrators regard as spam.
“We believe this is a promotional scholarship aimed to generate traffic to their website,” said Patti Kohler, scholarship coordinator at USU. “Our IT team at USU looked into it, as a large number of employees at USU were targeted in the company’s emails.”
Kohler said several faculty may have chosen to forward the email to students after receiving it themselves.
Bob Bayn, an IT Security Analyst at USU, said it didn’t look suspicious at first because the message itself appeared to be so realistic.
“What we noticed at USU was that many hundreds of employees were spammed with the notice about the scholarship,” Bayn said. “It should be a simple matter to send a scholarship notice to the scholarship office and Financial Aid, but this notice was sent to employees, like me, who have nothing at all to do with the scholarship process at USU.”
Bayn said he and his colleagues sent an email that cautioned students and faculty about the scholarship offer but did not go so far as to claim the scholarship was fraudulent.
“Our message to local recipients of the spam did not claim the scholarship was a scam,” Bayn said. “It said, ‘Our conclusion is that this scholarship looks more like a lottery or raffle that may actually support some advertising efforts of the sponsoring publishing company. We do not endorse this scholarship and discourage USU students from applying.'”
Bayn said the scholarship doesn’t conform to a couple of recommendations for reputable scholarship offers, such as having no application fee and being awarded based on need or academic progress.
“That webpage says, ‘no application fee required,’ but it links to the application form where it says, ‘Send 15 unused stamps or $5 (Stamps or cash only, to help defray mail handling, document shredding and product costs).’ Most scholarship offerings do not charge to defray those expenses,” Bayn said.
Bayn consulted an online service to check the legitimacy of the offer and asked if anyone thought the offer was good for students.
“If they give out one scholarship per 1,000 applicants, the students might be better off putting their money in a hat and picking a random winner,” Bayn said. “After all, the website says, ‘Winners are randomly selected based on application completeness.'”
Bayn said the IT department has taken action on this matter.
“It’s hard to prevent a spam event if it doesn’t look like typical spam to the automated filtering system,” Bayn said. “We have alerted all the recent recipients that we could find and provided the information that we have learned.”
The company offering the scholarship is Black Adonis/Trade Publishers.
“The scholarship originated from the need to create more awareness to the perils of harmful hazing on college campuses,” said Kim Sanders, from contract customer services for Black Adonis/Trade Publishers.
– juliann13stock@aggiemail.usu.edu