Notice: Email Scam Targeting Students

Email Scams Involving Student Accounts and Payments

May 26, 2023

An active e-mail scam involves student accounts and payments that purport to originate from UCD Student Accounting but are fraudulent. Cyber criminals use sophisticated methods to steal money and data.

These fraudulent e-mails may contain one or more of these traits or themes:

  • The request comes from the UCD Student Accounting (myaccount@ucdavis.edu) or other person in university leadership. The Student Accounting and Campus Cashiering does not ever ask a student to check their bank account to see if they have enough balance for tuition or living expenses for the next academic year.
  • The message has two signatures listed on the email.
  • The message includes an attachment that is designed to look like a billing statement, includes a logo or other graphic, and a signature that may look legitimate.
  • The e-mail message is poorly written, with misspellings and awkward sentence structure.
  • The sender's e-mail address does not end in ucdavis.edu or appears to end in ucdavis.edu, but when you hover over it, it directs to a different email address.  You should always hover over the email address to ensure it ends with ucdavis.edu.
  • The message may contain non-UC Davis phone or fax numbers.  When in doubt, perform an online search to confirm the status of a phone or fax number.

When in doubt about the legitimacy of a message, do not click on any of the links in the message, and do not take any action to fulfill what is being asked of you.

Prior to responding to the e-mail or fulfilling the request, verify its legitimacy by contacting UC Davis Student Accounting myaccount@ucdavis.edu or Campus Cashiering at cashier@ucdavis.edu.

To confirm where to pay your UC Davis student account, you can login to your MyBill account. Additional payment methods can be found at Campus Cashiering | Finance & Business (ucdavis.edu).

For international wire payments, please use Flywire International Payments (Bank of America)

If you believe you have received a fraudulent e-mail, you may forward it to afs-fraud@ucdavis.edu.