Potentially fraudulent credit card companies and disreputable businesses offering jobs have barraged Tufts students via phone and e-mail since the fall.
One of the more frequent callers, the Clout Company, reportedly calls students multiple times a day. A Google search yields a list of complaints filed against the company.
According to students who have received calls from the Clout Company, a representative from the company calls and asks for the person's social security number. If the person refuses to give that type of information over the phone, the company asks only for a name and address so the person can receive more information.
The company will then proceed to send a credit card by mail immediately. The person receives monthly bills, but the company claims to never receive the payment and threatens to call a collection agency if the bill is not paid immediately.
Freshman Chris Jenkins reported being called and offered a student Visa credit card repeatedly.
"They called me about four times a day for three days. One time it was seven times in one day. I don't know how they got my number," Jenkins said. "They only asked for me. What scared me the most is that they got my personal information and my dorm room phone number."
Despite Tufts Trumpeter Webmail spam and junk e-mail filters, some students have also received credit card solicitations in their Tufts e-mail accounts.
Marj Minnigh, Manager of Networks and Special Projects for the University's Computer Services Department, works both with campus-wide computer and phone systems.
"Tufts absolutely ... does not sell, rent, loan or otherwise give out any information about students. We also prevent the data from being hacked or harvested," Minnigh said.
Bob Webber, Manager of University Systems in the Computer Services Department said that it is both relatively easy and cheap for spammers to gather mass amounts of e-mail addresses.
"Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from sources such as archives of mailing lists, personal Web pages, and third parties who register e-mail addresses for contests or product registrations, and sometimes simply generate long lists of addresses that they try at random," he said. "[Tufts] would always refuse to sell your address - spammers aren't even interested in buying it, since they expect they'll get it at no cost somewhere else."
Some students have also found messages in their Tufts e-mail inboxes promising easy or fun jobs in the Medford area that they could do while living at Tufts.
"I get junk e-mails on my school account, but I don't open them." Jenkins said. "It's an invasion of privacy."
Spam blockers work by looking for keywords in title headings and return addresses on e-mail that signal that the message is mass-mailed from a company Web site.
Some more sophisticated companies can get around this filter by blocking keywords or using words that one would often find in e-mail title headings, although this is still an illegal practice.
