Fraudulent emails

We want to alert suppliers to an active email scam involving false purchase orders and requests for product quotations that purport to originate from the University of Plymouth but are in fact fraudulent. 

While the University cannot prevent this activity, we are actively working alongside members of our network in the Higher Education Procurement Association (HEPA) to collectively approach this challenge.

If you believe you are a supplier/recipient of such correspondence we want to share some common traits or themes of these fraudulent emails which we hope will help your company decide how to identify and address such correspondence.

• The email messages are often poorly written with misspellings and awkward sentence structures.
• The sender's website links are not authentic to the University of Plymouth.
• The email address used by the sender is in a subtly different format. For example @plymouth-ac.co.uk, a legitimate University email address will end in @plymouth.ac.uk
• Emails may include an attachment that is designed to look like a purchase order and may include a logo or other graphic and a signature.
• The email messages will not generally use legitimate University staff names