Scams on campus: students may get ripped off, administration needs to act

Bulletin boards are a fixture at De Anza college, and can be found throughout campus, loudly advertising anything from local events to job offers.

However, many of these bulletin boards also host oddly capitalized, ambiguous papers offering jobs that seem too good to be true.

De Anza has seen a rise in scams on campus and students are the targets. It is essential that De Anza administration does more to combat these issues.

Some fliers paint an image of the lucrative returns: Sell these knives (and recruit 10 more people by the end of the month) and you could earn tens of thousands of dollars!

Ponzi schemes don’t necessarily exist at the Enron scale. Pyramid schemes are the best known scams on the small scale, and their promised returns aren’t mathematically feasible.

Other flyers will promise wonderful well-paid jobs with little to no work involved: just log on to this sketchy website and give them money, and they promise to send your resume everywhere.

De Anza, while one of the highest ranking community colleges, is home to a significant fraction of students in need of financial aid, thus making them more likely to fall prey to scams. International students new to the American job market are even more vulnerable.

In a previous article on the subject of on-campus scams, La Voz News pointed out the difficulties in finding out if a business is following ethical practices.

Since students are the individuals at risk, they must be more vigilant in investigating businesses before joining.

If a business requests cash before looking at your resume, or if their home page is targeted at potential new employees rather than customers, be wary.

But ultimately, the De Anza college administration must take more steps in protecting and educating students.

The staff ought to search for un-approved flyers (typically a flyer must first be approved before being posted). It might even be best if administration calls the phone number on the flyers to inform them of the campus policies.

Finding the flyers isn’t hard; scammers post them all over the campus.

Although the De Anza administration is not responsible for students’ choices, the staff ought to immediately remove these flyers, and enforce more vehemently their policies.

When all put forth their effort, De Anza students won’t fall prey to scams.