Nidhi Razdan, the journalist who claimed to have quit NDTV to join Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences as Associate Professor over six months ago, said that she fell victim to a phishing attack, and, in fact, she never received an offer from the prestigious University.
Revealing on her Twitter account, Razdan said: “I have been the victim of a very serious phishing attack. … 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.” However, she said that with time, she noticed “a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me”.
After initially dismissing the “anomalies as being reflective of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic”, she later 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,” she said. After receiving replies from Harvard University she realized that she had been conned.
“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,” she said.
Razdan, as per the statement, has filed a complaint with the police, however, it is unclear whether she suffered financial losses due to the scam. She said, “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.”
