prominent TV Anchor Quit for Harvard Job that didn't exist

[Demovictory9]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq8m/india-nidhi-razdan-phishing-scam-harvard-job-offer-fake-cybersecurity

“I am Nidhi Razdan, not a Harvard professor.” These words from a blog, written on Jan. 16, by an Indian television journalist Nidhi Razdan, went somewhat viral on Indian Twitter over the weekend.

Razdan, a prominent anchor who worked with New Delhi-based English language TV news channel NDTV 24X7, announced over the weekend that she was a victim of a “serious phishing attack”. She said she was led to believe that she was offered an Associate Professor role at Harvard University. The job never existed.

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In one of the statements released on Jan. 16, Razdan said she was contacted by someone who claimed to be from Harvard. According to Razdan, an online search made her believe that it was a journalism faculty position at the University’s Extension School which has hired working journalists in the past. She submitted her resume and gave a 90-minute online interview. “I believed I fit this profile,” she recounted in one of the statements, adding that the offer letter, the letterhead and the university insignia looked genuine.

Her former colleagues at NDTV sent recommendation letters too. Sonia Singh, an editorial director at NDTV, tweeted that she was one of those people. “I gave Nidhi a recommendation as well and received an extremely genuine seeming university link to upload this,” she said in the tweet.

Over the next few months, Razdan claimed that while she figured out her work visa, she quit her job and was told the classes were delayed until Jan. 2021 because of COVID-19. Furthermore, she didn’t receive her promised salary. Finally, early in Jan, she wrote to the office of the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, only to be informed that there was no record of her appointment.



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Nidhi Razdan spent 21 years as the lead anchor of India's NDTV, which one might think would give her the chops to take on a position as an associate professor of journalism at Harvard. In fact, in June she said she was giving up her job to do that very thing, beginning in September, per Boston.com—or so she thought. On Friday, the 43-year-old revealed a "shocking development" on Twitter: There was no job. In fact, the school has neither a journalism department nor employs journalism professors. Razdan had fallen victim to a "sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack" that unspooled over the course of six months. As she was readying herself for her new gig—and appearing on TV and at events under the title "associate professor of journalism at Harvard," per the Boston Globe—she learned her start had been pushed to January 2021 due to COVID.

But per her tweeted explanation, she also "began noticing a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me." She initially dismissed them as being part "of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic, but recently the representations being made to me were of an even more disquieting nature." So she reached out to Harvard for clarification and learned Harvard hadn't made such an offer or been a part of any of the communication. Razdan tweeted that "the perpetrators of this attack used clever forgeries and misrepresentations to obtain access to my personal data and communications and may have also gained access to my devices and my email/social media accounts." She has filed a police complaint; there is of yet no word on who might have been behind the scam.

https://www.newser.com/story/301432/tv-anchor-quit-for-harvard-job-then-she-noticed-anomalies.html

[Beakybird]

1. What assholes? Who did this?

[catbyte]

2. Sounds like it could be somebody who wanted her job.