Catamount E-Mail Fraud Alert

An e-mail sent to WCU students appearing to be from Windows Live and Western Carolina University during the late afternoon hours on New Year’s Day is fake.

The message, which states is from admin@catamount.wcu.edu, is directed to another e-mail address when replied – adminweb@mail2student.com.

The e-mail said that temporary maintenances would be done on all catamount.wcu.edu email accounts and “in order to avoid your email account from being deactivated and to enable your records to remain in our database we advice you provide us with the below information or your email account will be suspended within 48 hours for security reasons.”

The information requested included the date of birth of the user and the user’s password, among other things. The complete text of the e-mail can be found below.

An official warning from Western officials had not been issued as of this article completion, but due to the sensitivity of the matter, the Western Carolinian wanted to advise students not to reply to the e-mail ahead of any possible WCU release.

E-mail sent out on New Year’s Day:

Dear Student,

We write to bring to your notice that we will be carrying out temporary maintenances on our services due to congestion in all catamount.wcu.edu email accounts and we are afraid that during this process, email accounts of our customers will be deactivated; in order to avoid your email account from being deactivated and to enable your records to remain in our database we advice you provide us with the below information or your email account will be suspended within 48 hours for security reasons.

Email address:Password:Date of Birth:Country or Territory:

After the receipt of the following instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

Thanks for your attention to this request.

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to upgrade his or her account before two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Kindly send the required information back to us. We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences this might have caused you.

Thank you for your co-operation and thanks again for choosing catamount.wcu.edu.

Sincerely,

Customer Care webmail Team