You might also suggest your student tries to Google herself - if she types in her e-mail in the Google search bar, any results will show the sites where her e-mail address can be found "out there". Automated e-mail harvesters could have picked her name up, or random name generators could just have got lucky.
If her e-mail address is @somewhere.ac.uk, it would be easy to guess she might be a good target for academic spam - or again, could simply be happenstance. She should a) make use of any built in spam filtering and then b) hit delete. The worst thing she could do is reply....
regards
Su
"J.Barrett-Murrer" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
We have received the following email from a student who wants to know
how these companies obtained details of his studies. We are positive
that they did not obtain his details from us.
Has anyone else come across this problem and know how these companies
obtained the data?
'Since getting the credits for my degree I have received a number of
e-mail's
offering me MA or Phd qualifications. Doing some checking on telephone
numbers
I find that these e-mail are from the USA and I view them as very
dodgy...
I have one question since I have not yet accepted my degree how
did
these people get the information I have a degree?
I was under the impression that the data held by the OU was
secure.
This would appear not to be the case. A second question occurs to me ...
how do
I stop these mails?'
Thanks Janice
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