On Jan. 13, some Central students became victims to a University Employee Payroll Scam.

Student employees were receiving emails indicating a change in their human resource status.

Scams can be used to attempt to get an individual’s personal information and/or money. They can also contain malicious codes, causing damage to the computer.

Sometimes spam messages contain viruses that could be deadly for the computer.

“This one particularly payroll scam isn’t occurring anymore,” said Andreas Bohman, Central’s chief information security officer. “Our Information Technology Services (ITS) program protects us pretty well from these types of scams but some unfortunately get through.”

Not many people were affected by the scam, Bohman said.

“We have usually about one or two users at the most that will click the scam link and have something bad happen to them. They click onto a bad website and get viruses on their computers,” Bohman said.

Whenever scams get into student emails, ITS sends out warning emails to warn students from reading the spam email. Unfortunately some students still click on the spam emails.

There are precautions students can take to safeguard their information and protect their computers from viruses.

“Don’t open attachments from someone you don’t know and don’t click any links of emails that take you to a compromised site,” Bohman said. “Our assistants catch the majority of these scams but some unfortunately make it past our systems.”

When in doubt, delete without opening.

“People need to learn awareness about this threat but were using everything we have to stop it,” Bohman said.