On Friday, Sept. 13, an email was sent to a swath of Oswego State students, purporting to be from a man named Dickey Elliot Douglas, looking for a student to fill an assistant position while they are still at school. 

The offer claimed to be authorized by the administration, and the job it was offering up sounded like quite a good gig for a college student. Although it should not have been that hard to catch that the email was a fake, considering it was being sent from the email account “trapremix2015@gmail.com.”

Today the administration sent a campus-wide email, explaining how the job offer was a spam email trying to get students to involve themselves in a check fraud or wire transfer fraud scheme. Hopefully, no students got involved in the shakedown. 

This experience should be a reminder to the Oswego State community that there are plenty of scams out there, and we should be wary of them at all times. Some of them may seem more legitimate than others, and one should always be skeptical of the legitimacy of a job offer that promises more than seems viable. 

There are plenty of scams that try to target college students, from online textbook scams, to companies that charge high fees to offer services that students can find for free and of course the good ol’ employment scam. Even legitimate companies can be roads to financial ruin for people. Multi-level marketing companies, which get people to sign on as salespeople for more-established sellers in pyramid-scheme style approach, offer students the opportunity to make money with minimal effort. What they do not tell you is how hard it can be to make money this way, and how unlikely the average person is to find success in that style of company. 

One should always be suspicious of the legitimacy of internet-based job offers, and everyone should stop and think, “Is this too good to be true?” before investing their hard-earned money or offering up their personal information.