This is a weird story. Nidhi Razdan is a famous television news anchor in India. She says she quit her job after being offered a position as associate professor of journalism at Harvard University.
But today Razdan tweeted, "After hearing from the University, I have now [learned] that I have been the victim of a sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack. I did not, in fact, receive an offer by Harvard University to join their faculty as an associate professor of journalism."
Her statement reads:
"In June 2020 and after 21 years with NDTV, I decided to move on and said that I would be joining Harvard University as an Associate Professor of Journalism.
I had been given to believe that I would be joining the University in September 2020. While I was making preparations to take up my new assignment, I was later told that due to the ongoing pandemic, my classes would commence in January 2021. Along with these delays, I began noticing a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me. At first, I had dismissed these anomalies as being reflective of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic, but recently the representations being made to me were of an even more disquieting nature. As a result, I reached out to senior authorities at Harvard University for clarity. Upon their request, I shared some of the correspondence that I believed I had received from the University.
After hearing from the University, I have now learnt that I have been the victim of a sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack. I did not, in fact, receive an offer by Harvard University to join their faculty as an Associate Professor of Journalism. 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. Alarmed at the scale of this attack, I have filed a complaint with the police and provided them with all the relevant documentary evidence. I have requested them to take immediate steps to identify, apprehend and prosecute the perpetrators of this abominable attack. Separately I have written to the Harvard University authorities and urged them to take the matter seriously.
In the past few days, I have written to individuals and organizations with whom I have been in touch with over the past few months to keep them informed of this shocking development. I hope that the police are able to get to the bottom of this attack on me at the earliest and help me bring this unsavoury incident to a swift end."
She added, "I will not be addressing this issue any further on social media."
From The Boston Globe:
Just one setback. Harvard doesn't have a journalism program.
After months of delays that she attributed to the pandemic, Razdan had a jarring realization: the faculty position, it turns out, doesn't exist. The offer she thought she had accepted was nothing more than an elaborate ploy to access her personal information, she said.
…
Others were skeptical about Razdan's version of events.
"Don't fall for her spin as the victim here," one person wrote. "All after having been called out for masquerading as an Associate Professor at Harvard, to build clout through speaking engagements."
[Image: By Joseph Williams – originally posted to Flickr as Harvard, CC BY 2.0]
