Members of the Penn community received a satirical email on Feb. 27 that was modeled after official University communications.
Credit: Chenyao LiuA significant number of Penn students received a fraudulent email on Tuesday appearing to impersonate communications from the University Board of Trustees.
An unknown number of students received the satirical email throughout the day on Tuesday — which discusses campus events that have transpired over the last semester — in their personal email inbox, while others received the email in their University inbox. As of publication, who sent the email and how student email addresses were collected is unknown.
Requests for comment were left with spokespeople from the University and Penn Department of Information Systems and Computing.
The email refers to the University as “beholden to the richest, scummiest people out there.” It adds that Liz Magill will return to her post as president of the University “after nearly three months of timeout.”
The email also makes reference to Interim Penn President Larry Jameson, writing that “Larry what's-his-name obviously wasn't doing Penn any favors on the name-recognition front.”
Jeremy Cimino, a sophomore in the School of Nursing — who received the email to his personal email at 12:50 p.m. — said that while he “believed [the email] for a good minute,” he quickly realized that it was not accurate.
“I don’t see it as something too serious, I just see it as something that is kind of a joke, and to be fair it is kind of funny,” Cimino added. “In the end, I don’t think there was really any harm done.”
The email includes two links, one to John Stuart Mill’s "On Liberty" and the other to a YouTube version of Rick Astley’s "Never Gonna Give You Up."
As of publication, the second link redirects to a warning message which reads: “The web page you are attempting to access has been classified as malicious.”
There have been several email scams that have targeted Penn students in recent years.
In 2021, a large number of Penn students received scam emails from fraudulent Penn email addresses asking them to partake in research or job opportunities, prompting the College of Arts and Sciences to warn students.
In February 2017, a slew of Penn affiliates were targets of a phishing scam in which they were instructed to click on a series of faulty links to "update" their servers.
A message at the bottom of the email read: “For those of you who failed remedial kindergarten and couldn't tell, this email is satire.”
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