Scams to be aware of
Please be careful of scams by offering discounted tuition fee payments or asking you to transfer money to third-party accounts. These are fraudulent schemes designed to steal your money and personal information.
Advice from Student Finance and the Student Loans Company is that they’ll never ask students to provide or verify their personal or financial information via email or text message.
How scams can work
- Fraudsters contact students via social media, email, or messaging apps, with .
- They claim they can pay your tuition fees at a discounted rate if you , or they might be or that is too good to be true.
- They may provide fake receipts or screenshots to make it look legitimate.
Important: Âéw¶¹´«Ã½ will never
- Ask you to pay tuition fees to any account other than the official Âéw¶¹´«Ã½ payment channels.
- Âéw¶¹´«Ã½ staff will never email you asking to buy them an Amazon or Apple voucher, or something similar.
- Offer discounts for paying through third parties.
How to stay safe – it's getting harder to spot scams but following some simple steps will really help
- Please review the spelling and grammar of any message you receive as poor punctuation and misspelling are often signs it isn't genuine.
- Protect your personal accounts with additonal security, often called Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) or 2 Step verification (2SV). Your Âéw¶¹´«Ã½ account is protected by MFA but please add this to your as well.
- Keep an eye out for any suspicious emails, calls or texts around the time of an expected payment.
- Scam emails are often sent in bulk and commonly start with ‘Dear Student’ rather than individual names.
- Be mindful of information you share about yourselves online, to help guard against identity theft.
- Always use official phone numbers of a company, the online account and official communication channels to verify the contact received is genuine.
- Urgent messages are usually not genuine, for example ‘'failure to respond in 24 hours will result in your account being closed’ - this is trying to make you act without thinking clearly.
What to do if you’re approached
- Do not respond to the message.
- Do not share personal or banking details.
- Report it immediately to Âéw¶¹´«Ã½ Security and Digital & Technology servicedesk@dmu.ac.uk.
- If you’ve already sent any money, contact your bank and report to Action Fraud: or by calling 0300 123 2040.
Stay vigilant and stay safe online
If an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Take a look at our student data security pages for great tips to protect yourself.
Take these online quizzes to see if you can spot when you are or see if you can .
If in doubt, talk to us – Digital & Technology security staff will be happy to help.