Email Scares: Students deal with blackmailing and scamming on their school accounts

Students have been receiving scam emails on their school email accounts throughout this past month.

The scammers have claimed to have access to students’ personal information and in some cases demanded ransoms to keep the information private.

Assistant principal, Kristoff Barikmo explained that the reason students are receiving an influx of these messages is because a scam operator made guesses at students’ email addresses. After finding an address, the scam operator most likely found more student information or student numbers, and then started to send out messages — hoping someone would click on them.

“Once a scammer finds a hit, they try to take advantage of that and they send as much information as they can within those email addresses,” Barikmo said. “None of this is because any network has been hacked, none of this is because anybody’s information has been compromised.”

Sophomore Kai Campbell was a recipient of one of these emails. The message came from Campbell’s own email address reading that his MacBook was infected with a private trojan remote administration tool, a type of malware designed to allow an attacker to remotely control an infected computer. The scammer claimed that the trojan could access all of his accounts, camera and microphone. 

The scammer claimed to have evidence of Campbell “checking out porn websites and watching dirty videos.” The email then demanded that Kai send $1,600 in Bitcoin within 48 hours or else the private information would be posted.

“I did open the email up because I saw the beginning [of the message] and was just super confused,” Kai said. “This is the first time I’ve gotten something like this and it was also weird that it came from my own account.”

Kai received the same exact email seven times over the course of one week. And he wasn’t the only one. Juniors Makena Campbell and Brennen Barnes, along with sophomores Claire Langford and Janie Hoskins, have all received emails blackmailing them for money.

“It was really creepy and also annoying,” Hoskins said. “I deleted a bunch of my passwords just to make sure I didn’t get another one.”

The current blackmail messages are not only happening at East, the scammers are also targeting devices across the Shawnee Mission School District. Barikmo and other assistant principals throughout the district have been working with the Information Technology department to prevent these scams.

The district has network security measures in place to prevent extreme cases of blackmail before it gets to a student or teacher’s account, but there are still cases where scam mail can get through.

When this happens, the IT department analyzes the emails and figures out what internet protocol address the emails came from, along with how many people received the emails. Then the department can delete those emails from student accounts.

“The problem is, those [IP addresses] change instantly because that’s how scammers operate,” Barikmo said. “So that’s why we’re still working on handling these recent scams.”  

According to Barikmo and principal Jason Peres, the best way for students to deal with these emails is to report the issue. Students can do this by submitting a WebHelpDesk ticket, which will go straight to the SMSD Information and Communications Technology support website. They can submit the information and paste a copy of the email to a form that alerts the IT department of an issue.

“I see this situation as just a phishing scam where someone has gotten ahold of student emails and is sending out an email blast hoping that someone hits back and gives them money or something that they can exploit for their game,” Peres said. “As long as students report it and don’t give them what they want and our IT department investigates it, we will find a way to prevent it and block it from happening.”