Dr. Rich Wlezien, vice provost and dean of the College of Engineering and Computing, shares the following message with S&T employees:

Dear CEC Faculty and Staff:

You may have received an email purportedly from me asking for your cell phone number. The sender subsequently requests that you purchase gift cards. Unfortunately, this is a scam which repeats on a regular basis using false email addresses and cell phone numbers.

There are several things we can do to help ensure this scam is not effective:

1. The email was not sent from an mst.edu address. The specific address was deaninterim4@gmail.com. Please bear in mind that anyone can use a false name or title to create an email address on services such as Gmail. Only I have access to my legitimate mst.edu account. Please check that an email is truly from me before responding.

2. The phone number used in this attack is not mine. My cell number begins with the prefix 757 because I received that number when I lived in southern Virginia. I would never send an email asking for your cell phone number.

3. You were asked to purchase something on my behalf. Once again, this is something I would never do.

4. Finally, if in some rare and unforeseen circumstance I do contact you and ask you to contact me via phone, I suggest you call me and have a phone conversation with me before doing anything. If the request comes from a scammer, they should not be able to talk about things that would be known to you and me, such as specifics about CEC or S&T.

I’m sorry that this scam has repeated, and I don’t doubt it will be tried again. Together we can work to make it more avoidable in the future.

Sincerely,

Rich Wlezien
Vice Provost and Dean
College of Engineering and Computing