Fraudulent Quote Request / Purchase Order Email Activity
The University of California, Riverside (UCR) Procurement Services department wants to alert you to an active email scam involving requests for quotations and tendering of purchase orders that purport to originate from UCR, but which in fact are fraudulent.
While the University cannot prevent this illegal activity, we are actively working with law enforcement to investigate these fraudulent email contacts and to develop more secure ways of doing business.
Although this investigation is active, we can share with you some common traits or themes of these fraudulent emails which may help reduce the risk to your company from becoming a financial victim of this scam:
- The sender's email address differs from the University’s standard Purchase Order email address, “noreply@financials.ucr.edu,” or the website link “ucr.edu.”
- The sender’s phone number does not contain (951) 827-XXXX
- The delivery zip code is not 92521 (The zip code 92521 is unique to UCR)
- The message requests shipment/delivery of products to a non-University of California address. Take a moment to check out the address in Google maps. UCR does not typically request delivery to apartments, mobile home parks, business complexes or residential addresses.
- The quote requests large quantities of highly resalable items such as electronics, hard drives, memory, toner, medical items, etc.
- The email message is poorly written, with misspellings and awkward sentence structure.
Examples of Fraudulent email address domains:
- @ucrriverside.org
- @ucrriversidecity.org
- @ucr.org
- @ucr.net
- @ucr.com
- @ucrvs.org
The message may include an attachment that is designed to look like an official request for quote or purchase order and may be accompanied by a credit letter. It may include an authentic logo copied from our website or contain some other graphic designed to look legitimate. It may even include a signature that appears to be genuine.
If you are not familiar with the form and/or content of a UCR Purchase order or suspect fraud in any way please contact us immediately by forwarding the message to our Procurement Services at purchasing@ucr.edu to verify its legitimacy before responding to the email or filling the order.
You may also contact the Procurement Services department by phone or email, Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Incidents or complaints may also be filed with the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center located at www.ic3.gov