Got a call at work from a "student" interviewing IT professionals as an "assignment". Scam?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Our receptionist transferred the call to me, apparently he asked to speak to someone in IT. He said that he was a college student and that his professor had given him an assignment to talk to some IT professionals about their motivations for choosing that particular profession and that he had been given the name of our company.

I was very busy but my first instinct was not to snub some poor college kid forced into an unpleasant assignment. So I told him that I was busy and asked how long it would take. At that point he said he could call back, or maybe I could give him a couple of other names in our IT department.

I told him that I was the entire IT department, apologized, said I was too busy and hung up.

I’ve been feeling bad about putting off a college student, but after thinking about it the whole thing seems strange, something I may have realized subconsciously at the time.

It seemed like the guy was pumping me for information. Something - my phone number, names, whatever - that he could use later for who knows what.

The company I work for is not well known. I almost guarantee that most or none of you have heard of it. What it does is not even vaguely IT related. Obviously any sufficiently large company will have some sort of IT, and we do have a website, but it seems odd that a student would be given our name to talk to an IT professional.

I’m thinking he or someone else would have called back later to try and pull a printer toner scam or some such. Maybe he was a hacker looking for names to try to guess email addresses. We’re in a competitive industry so industrial espionage is not out of the question.

Was this the prelude to some common scam? It’s a tough thing to Google. No matter how I word it my results were all about scams run against students, rather than by fake students.

Should the company send out a warning to our employees about speaking with such callers? We wouldn’t want to come off as hostile to real students making such calls.

Do college professors really give out such assignments?

On Edit: He does have my name now, since that’s how I answer the phone. Is there anything I should be watching for?

2

That could definitely be a toner-phoner trying to get information. On the other hand, it could also be a student. It might have been a better idea to ask him the name of his professor and the name of the college, and tell him you might talk to him after talking to the professor. Or not. I mean, he probably was (if it was legit) told to expect a good deal of rejection.

3

It seems so unlikely that he would be calling our company for an IT assignment, but what do I know?

I’m thinking that a company should probably have some kind of formal policy about such calls. Have them vetted by HR or something.

4

I’d think that if a professor gave out your company’s name specifically for the assignment somebody in the company would have been notified ahead of time that students might call. Maybe not if you’re Microsoft or something that fields about ten billion inquiries an hour, but for a smaller company like yours I would think you’d have prior knowledge that SOMEONE is going to call.

That’s not to say the professor couldn’t be a bit… eccentric and not call ahead, and while I’m not sure it was a scam necessarily, I certainly can’t fault you for being cautious.

5

I find it difficult to believe that a professor would have students randomly call and interrupt people at work. It also seems odd that said professor would give out random company names without first speaking to someone in the company about having employees interrupted. Then again, the professor could be a flake with a list of names and numbers from the yellow pages, but that seems unlikely.

It does sound potentially scammy.

6

He might well be trying that. My workplace (a large-ish hospital) received an alert from our Security department a month or so ago, saying that various people have been trying “social engineering” calls in an attempt to get information like that, though I don’t think it was the same method. It seems to be part of getting account info.

My WAG is that not only might it be a toner scam, but an attempt to get info on an IT employee might lead into a followup attempt of “hey, this is (IT Guy Name), I need to get access to your account to fix something…”

7

That last point is a very good one. Now I’m a little worried.

8

Scam. Usually a recruitment agency flack.

I remember one of these calls many, many years ago. I went the route of asking which school he attended (because we looked after the schools’ IT) and who the teacher was. Unfortunately, he picked a school that I knew well… a girls’ school. :smiley:

9

The possibility that it was a recruitment agency did cross my mind.

I think I need to talk to somebody on Monday about some official policy on handling these kinds of calls. Maybe we need to alert everyone about giving out information, and to be positive about who they’re talking to when they receive calls.

10

Not every phone call you receive from an unfamiliar party is a scam. What do you mean it “seemed like” he was pumping you for information? Was he or wasn’t he? Did he ask you for names and other information? If he does this, you are free to end the call. If you speak with him and his questions were what he said they would be (motivations, etc) then I struggle to see the scam.

11

On the other hand, if he was fishing for names to use in a “hey, I was talking to ‘Tony’ about your company’s order of printer toner” kind of way, since you told him you’re the entire IT department, he might be less likely to bother with you.

12

To be on the safe side, you should probably give him all the passwords that you use.

13

I’ll call him back first thing Monday and do that. Thanks for the tip.

14

Just to the voice of dissent, this isn’t that weird for a school project. I remember when I started library school, one of the very first assignments was to interview a librarian about their job.

Although we were explicitly instructed to identify the school before we began asking questions.

15

But it seems weird my company was chosen. They don’t deal directly with consumers, so the vast majority of people have never heard of them, and what they do isn’t even vaguely IT related. No one would think of them when coming up with a list for something like this.

16

A few months ago, I was required to contact a company and ask questions of someone in their HR department, as part of a job-search training seminar. So it’s not that impossible that it’s something real. But had to go to the company in person…

17

My first thought was toner scam or someone’s fishing for names to use as references for a job hunt.

18

I was thinking the same thing too. I was also thinking that this guy, if he is a scammer, might not be targeting the op’s company, but someone else that his company deals with. He could borrow the OP’s identity, if he’d given the guy more useful info then his name, to give the scam more veracity to hack the real target.

Honestly OP, I think you did the right thing. It could have been legit, true, but who knows? Better to err on the side of caution. You have access to sensitive and useful info, I’m sure, so to my way of thinking a little paranoia is healthy.

19

That was my first thought. The toner-phoner scam maybe as well. Doesn’t sound like a legitimate assignment, but then again, college professors often have no concept of what the real world is like.

20

Posting to say that this seems like a scam to me.

However, I *have *had four assignments so far in graduate school (library and information science) where I’ve had to interview someone in a particular position or field.

I’ve always been able to pick the person myself, and I was always given specific instructions on how to introduce myself and my school affiliation when asking for an interview; always went through HR, then the department head (if the interviewee wasn’t the department head), always try email before calling so there’s a physical record of the request, always include prof’s contact info and the specifics of the assignment, that sort of thing.

It could be that this was a harried student who had bad info passed on from an overworked TA or a flaky professor, but if you aren’t really known for IT, him contacting your particular position seems really… off.

I’d make a notation of the time and specifics of the call, and what info he was able to get from you, and pass that on up the pike.

That way if someone later does do the toner scam or the “Hi, this is **Davidm **from IT, I need to get your password so I can fix your email account” scam, you’re off the hook for being responsible. You ended the call pronto, and you notified the company of the possibility that scammers were targeting you - once that’s done, there’s really not much more you can do. Just about everyone answers their work phones with their names - it isn’t really something you can avoid because of the off-chance of a scammer taking advantage.