Scammers are going back to school

📢 Title

Protecting the campus: How social engineering bypasses traditional email security

🚨 Subject:

Inside a rising email scam targeting schools, staff, and students—without using a single link.

🔎 What’s Happening?

Cloudflare Email Security has recently identified a growing email scam trend aimed squarely at the education sector—particularly schools, colleges, and universities.

These emails appear harmless at first glance: plain-text messages, no links, no attachments. But there’s a catch—they impersonate trusted staff members offering high-demand personal items for sale, like Airstream trailers, guitars, or power tools.

What makes them effective?

• They come from personal email accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo)
• They mimic the casual tone of internal school communication
• They rely on conversation—not code—to trick recipients

Once a recipient replies, the scam escalates into financial fraud or data harvesting. The lack of traditional phishing markers means they often bypass legacy email filters completely.

⚠️ Why It Matters

The education sector is a prime target for attacks. Schools and universities have large, decentralized networks that create more opportunity for impersonation and more potential victims.

These attacks rely entirely on social engineering. There’s no malware to scan, no obvious phishing link to block. Instead, they start as a simple conversation, gradually building trust before the exploit.

A key challenge is the ‘freemail factor’. Messages are sent from personal email addresses, making it hard to distinguish a legitimate staff member from an imposter without deeper behavioral analysis.

🛠️ How Cloudflare Stops It

Cloudflare Email Security doesn’t rely on catching just links or attachments. Instead, we focus on behavioral analysis, intent-based detection, and contextual patterns to uncover threats hidden in plain text.

In this campaign, our systems detected:

• Freemail accounts impersonating staff or faculty
• Language mimicking casual internal conversations
• Sudden mentions of high-value personal items
• No links, no attachments—just social manipulation
• Subtle deviations from historical communication behavior

By understanding not just what is being said, but how and why, Cloudflare protects schools and universities from scams that traditional tools overlook.

🎓 Stay Smart, Stay Safe

These scams are a reminder that not all threats come with flashing red flags. Inboxes in the education sector need more than traditional filters—they need intelligent, adaptive protection that understands human behavior. Cloudflare Email Security helps institutions protect their people—whether the threat is a suspicious file or a suspicious offer.

This article is part of our Phishing Detection series, where we break down the latest trends in email-based attacks—and how Cloudflare detects and stops them before they reach your inbox.

—————————————————————————————————————————

Learn more 

Read more details about how our email security service works and request a free phishing risk assessmentto see how your existing security controls stack up.