Teachers and university professors

Academic authority is easy to copy

Every university publishes its faculty with photos, titles and research interests. That directory is a ready-made cast for fraud aimed at students and early-career researchers, who are conditioned to treat an email from a professor as legitimate.

Gift-card fraud in schools

A widespread variant targets staff rather than students: a message appearing to come from a head of department asks a junior colleague to buy gift cards for an event and send the codes, promising reimbursement. The stolen photo appears on the messaging profile to complete the impression.

The academics affected

Professors report students arriving with acceptance letters they never wrote, and grant offers carrying their signature. Correcting it consumes departmental time and occasionally damages relationships with applicants who believed they were admitted.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.