Teacher and principal email scams

No, your principal, superintendent, nor fellow teacher is going to ask you to purchase gift cards through an email.

E-mail and phishing scams

It seems like every so often one of our teachers will get an email supposedly from their principal or our superintendent, saying that they are unavailable to be called or texted at this time but they need a teacher to run to the store and buy gift cards. I do not know of any district that it is allowed to buy gift cards, let alone have the teacher just run out and buy them.

It’s funny, when they get a scam from one of the principles to buy video game related gift cards, such as those from Steam. A lot of principals have no idea what Steam is, let alone need to have a teacher run out and buy a gift card.

There are also scams trying to get you to enter in your password or get personal information from you. If you click on a link and are immediately presented with a login in screen, DO NOT ENTER YOUR INFORMATION. Close the tab and check the original email. When in doubt, forward the email to your technology department for further analysis.

Never ever give out your password to anyone! And if you have two factor authentication turned on, never ever ever give out your two factor code or emergency backup codes to anyone. There is no situation that will occur where you have to give out your password or two-factor authentication codes.

What should you do?

Anytime you receive any email that looks slightly questionable, forward the message to your IT department. Don’t screenshot it, there’s other information within the email that is important for your IT department to look at to see what the scam is where it’s coming from. The full message will give them more information on what they can do about it.

If you know, it’s a scam, just delete it. You can also mark the message as spam and then delete it.