CAMPUS SECURITY
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Fraud against international university students on the rise
International students are flocking to Canada to enroll in our academic institutions.
There were more than half a million overseas students in Canada last year, according to market intelligence company ICEF Monitor, approximately threequarters of which were enrolled in postsecondary institutions.
But a downside of this growth is the opportunity for fraud and victimization of both students and institutions.
Western Union Business Solutions is one of the solution providers working with Canadian schools to ensure that legitimate payments are made between students and universities. The organization works with more than 90 schools in Canada, offering payment services to help them transact safely with overseas students who are paying for their tuition.
“We support Canadian universities in the collection of tuition payments and we have processes in place to ensure that we limit their exposure” to potential threats, says Roy Farah, head of Western Union Business Solutions for Canada.
There are numerous international agencies working on behalf of students, acting as brokers to carry out payments to the schools they will attend. The overwhelming majority of them are legitimate businesses, says Farah, but there are bad actors out there who will attempt to thwart the payment process for their own gain. A popular scheme, he says, is to offer a fake discount on tuition to entice a would-be student to use their service. The fraudster may accept payment from the student, then use a stolen credit
card number to complete the transaction with the university. “If it’s a stolen credit card, obviously it will be discovered at some point and the student will be out of funds,” he says.
In other cases, the agency may seek a refund from the institution without the student’s consent and simply keep the funds. The student arrives at school to discover they have been withdrawn from their classes and are also out of pocket for the tuition expenses.
“We work collaboratively with universities to ensure they are aware of these types of scams.”
— Roy Farah, Western Union Business Solutions, Canada
Depending on the country from which the transaction originated, it may be difficult to seek
remuneration or pursue any legal action, says Farah. But as a service provider, “we do work collaboratively with universities to ensure that they are aware of these types of scams,” he says. “We can flag the remitter to ensure that any remitter that has been associated with this type of activity will not be
able to do this type of transaction again.”
Another typical scheme is a fraudster will pose as a government agent, phone a student and threaten them, says Farah. They may pretend to be a member of the Chinese government, for example, and demand payment from the student, claiming that they dropped a course without consent.
A website for the International Student Centre at the University of Toronto Scarborough details several common scenarios that phone scammers perpetrate, including posing as the Canada Revenue Agency and demanding money under threat of deportation. Such agencies “will not call you, and will not ask for money or personal information by phone” the website offers in terms of advice.
Western Union utilizes a team that carries out forensic investigations, data analysis and process management. “Our team helps us create processes and policies but we also, from time to time, change those policies to make sure we’re ahead of the bad guys,” says Farah.
— Neil Sutton
By Kenrick Bagnall
HOW TO REPORT CYBER BULLYING
There are resources available to help protect children of all ages
Back in the Sept./Oct. 2016 issue of Canadian Security, I wrote about standing up to cyber bullies.
Three years later, cyber bullying continues to evolve as both the number of victims and the ways in which they are victimized increase.
As children approach adolescence, they begin to seek validation outside the social circle of their immediate family. The internet and social media have exponentially expanded the landscape of potential social interaction. This has created a vast space for cyber criminals to operate with impunity and have access to literally billions of potential victims.
Cyber bullying is still at its core about the strong preying on the weak. It is critically important for parents, family members, loved ones and friends to be hyper vigilant in spotting the signs of cyber bullying. This can often be difficult to do since the bullying itself takes place in the virtual world. Sometimes even signs of sudden and disruptive changes in eating and sleeping patterns, changes in mood and general temperament could all indicate that someone is being affected by a cyber bully.
If your child is at the elementary school level, it is always a good idea to limit his or her use of internet devices and social media accounts. Make sure that you “follow” all of your child’s accounts; be aware of who they are following and who is following them.
A total of 20 to 30 friends between school, play or sports groups and family may be a reasonable number. A child in elementary school having a friends list of several hundred or several thousand followers is a glaring red flag and lays the foundation for a cyber bully or predator to hide anonymously.
Parents should also be aware of the terms and conditions of social media providers. Most of them require a minimum age of 13 to use their services. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and several others. Recently in Europe, WhatsApp announced an age minimum of 16 to use their service. This is in response to recent guidelines in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
If your child’s school has a dedicated school resource officer or there are community officers dedicated to the neighbourhood around your child’s
school area, it would be a good idea to get to know who they are and the best ways to contact them. If you are unaware on either count, just call the non-emergency number for your local municipal law enforcement agency and request guidance.
Colleges and universities have security personnel and some may have their own special constables. Matters involving cyberbullying should be reported to them as soon as possible. They will take an initial report and then escalate to local law enforcement as deemed necessary.
Cyber bullying, like any other cybercrime, will require the collection, preservation and presentation of digital evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal court. Collect screen shots of everything you can and make notes of the corresponding dates and times of everything being captured. Contact law enforcement as quickly as possible to provide a statement and hand over all of the evidence you’ve collected (be sure to keep copies for your own records).
Contacting law enforcement is critical in the reporting process but it’s also very important to contact the social media provider as well. You can do this through their “report abuse” options. Let them know what’s happened and ask them to remove the abusive content. The mainstream social media providers are empathetic and will quickly investigate and remove content where deemed inappropriate and in violation of their terms of use. As important as this step is, don’t forget to capture everything before content is removed by the provider.
As with all cybercrime related matters, I strongly recommend proactive dialogue. It’s important to take these things out of the shadows and shine an informative light on them. Taking advantage of resources like childnet.com, stopbullying.gov and prevnet.ca is a great way to stay informed and share valuable information and resources on how to protect some of the most vulnerable amongst us.
Kenrick Bagnall is a Detective Constable with the Toronto Police Service Computer Cybercrime Unit (C3) Twitter: @KenrickBagnall.
Optimize Your Campus Security with Aiphone
Amajor development in K-12 best security practices over the past 20 years has been a focus on hardening entries to campus facilities. Very often criminals, including active shooters, enter a building the same way most of us do — through the front door.
Current industry best practices call for a combination of locked doors and video intercoms at main entries as the most effective way to screen and identify visitors with minimal delays. The practice also can be easily extended to employee and vendor entries.
Visitors pushing the call button on an Aiphone IX Series 2 video intercom station reach a master station typically located in the main office. From there, office staff or school resource officers can see visitors on the 7” screen and conduct a two-way conversation before deciding to remotely open the door. If there is any doubt about a visitor’s intentions, the door can remain closed and locked.
Aiphone network-based video intercoms can be controlled and monitored from a district’s central security operations center. The IX Series 2 mobile app enables school guards or officers to remain in control of the system while patrolling the campus. These tools make video intercoms ideal for allowing access for community groups using school facilities after classes.
Embedded cameras in the IX Series 2 intercoms also helps eliminate “piggybacking” – an event where unannounced guests attempt to enter along with an approved visitor. The intercoms can also record videos of visitors for forensic review.
Fences and gates help control pedestrian traffic patterns and funnel visitors to the main entry for campus access. Signage placed in parking lots, along pathways, and at entries help explain the access control process to visitors.
On larger high school campuses, Aiphone emergency towers with embedded IX Series 2 video intercoms add security in remote parking lots, around gymnasiums, and football stadiums. With the push of a button, a distressed student, teacher, or staff member can contact campus security or local first responders. An optional CCTV arm allows a surveillance camera to be mounted above the tower, offering a broader view of any situation
at hand.
Sometimes emergencies, such as a medical problem or an out-of-control student, originate in the classroom. In these cases, teachers can use Aiphone intercoms to call the main office for assistance. If the teacher is interrupted before speaking, office personnel will see where the call was initiated by using the master station’s caller ID feature.
The pressure on campus administrators to protect their students has never been greater. By using both video and audio intercoms from Aiphone, administrators and security personnel can know who’s at the front entry, while communicating routine and emergency messages across the entire campus.
Optimize Campus Security with a Powerful Emergency Communication System
The powerful IX Series 2 peer-to-peer IP video intercom platform helps to unify campus communication:
• Connect schools across a district
• District-wide communication during emergencies
• Video entry system for visitor identification and access control
• Classroom communication
• Bell scheduling
• Integrate multiple security layers
• SIP capability for external calling
While offering you a reliable, cost-effective solution:
• No Aiphone licensing fees
• Peer-to-peer solution means no single point of failure and eliminates the need for a central server
• IP technology allows you to use the existing network infrastructure
Safe students: A shared responsibility
New priorities and challenges are keeping post-secondary campus security directors busy, but students and faculty have a part to play too
By Will Mazgay
Ensuring a safe and healthy environment on university campuses has always been a tall task for the security professionals at these institutions, but new risks and heightened awareness of existing problems have added new dimensions to the responsibilities of campus security departments.
For Kirsty Bradley-McMurtrie, director of safety and security at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ont., mental health is a priority at her school.
“My team are always the first responders to any medical situation, including mental health crises, so they’re all now trained in mental health first aid,” she says.
Bradley-McMurtrie continues,
“There’s a real focus on how we respond to those situations, so we can better help the students that could be in crisis, or could be trying to reach out for help… we’re the only ones here 24/7, so for us it was important how we responded first at the scene to those incidents.”
Pat Patton, director, security and operations, for the University of Regina (U of R), agrees that there is a need for security officers to be able to respond to students grappling with mental health issues. “We often see people at the face of an issue, if they’re having a challenge in the middle of the night, it’s often our folks that get called to it,” Patton says. Her officers also receive mental health first-aid training.
At Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU), there is a 24/7 number
that’s available in over 40 different languages for students experiencing a crisis during off-hours, says Mark LaLonde, the school’s chief safety officer. “They can speak to somebody right away, which can then loop them into a physical meeting,” he says.
“Mental health, and especially emergency mental health, for our community has been a really big focus for us for several years. When we have a critical event, we have a critical issues management team that we’ll rally, either in-person or on phone right away,” LaLonde continues. “We’re also offering mental health first-aid training for our security teams.”
Man up against violence
Another issue that has received
heightened attention on campuses in recent years is sexual violence.
To that extent, Patton has played a pivotal role in championing a sexual violence awareness program at U of R, “Man Up Against Violence.” The program emphasizes prevention and the root causes of gender-based and sexual violence, and it asks men to take an active role in prevention, by speaking out and speaking up. She was interviewed by Canadian Security magazine for the September/October 2016 edition about the program, when she was named Security Director of the Year.
Now, in 2019, Patton says, “I think that people in general are starting to recognize the issue of gender-based violence and the issue around toxic masculinity and how that affects violence in our society and on our campuses.”
When it comes to recent developments like the #MeToo movement, Patton says, “I think it’s strengthened the resolve for the people on the university campus to
understand that this is a major problem and that we need to have a solid policy in order to deal with it.”
With respect to that policy, “the university has undergone a bit of an assessment on the area around sexual violence and our response to that,” says Patton. “So, there is a task force that’s set up to support the policy that we have in place. What it ends up doing is giving us basically an integrated response, where we have more than just one unit involved in sexualized violence and responding to it — it’s really a group effort on behalf of the university.”
Bradley-McMurtrie says Conestoga focuses on educating its community on sexual violence, not just students but staff, visitors and contractors, and the school is offering new courses to staff and students, such as nonviolent crisis intervention, “upstander” training (intervening against bullying or harassment) and free self-defence training. She says the school offers information for survivors on how to get support, on campus and off, reporting incidents, and for friends and allies of survivors, how they can help.
At SFU, there is a standalone office, the Sexual Violence Support & Prevention Office, which LaLonde says facilitates investigations, survivor support and safety planning.
Preparing for the worst
One of the most daunting challenges facing campus security is what to do in a worst-case scenario.
LaLonde says SFU’s Campus Public Safety department holds events several times throughout the year where they simulate a catastrophe.
“We’ve got a schedule of how we do these throughout the year, and at least three times a year we’ll do something where we have the president and vice presidents involved as the senior policy group for an emergency,” LaLonde says.
“Everybody gets comfortable with their roles, everybody gets comfortable with how information flows and decisions are made.”
He says his team has simulated a
forest fire, a cyber breach and an active shooter situation.
In particular, the danger posed by an active shooter on a post-secondary campus has come into sharp focus.
“We use the run, hide, fight procedure for our lockdown,” says BradleyMcMurtrie.
Conestoga’s security director says it’s important to communicate to faculty what their responsibilities are in an emergency like a violent lockdown, and for faculty members to then communicate to students what their options are.
Another challenge, according to Bradley-McMurtrie, is ensuring her school’s emergency response policy is the same across its several different campuses in several different cities. “It doesn’t matter which campus you are at, you know the policy and procedure,” she says.
For U of R, their emergency response program is helped by a mass notification system called Alertus, which uses wall-mounted devices integrated throughout campus that provide visual, text and audio alerts in the event of an emergency. Patton says her staff can use the system to send out a message that is not only communicated through the wall beacons, but to TV monitors, desktop computers and student smart phones via the school’s app.
Conestoga has a mobile app specifically for safety which is used for emergency notification. BradleyMcMurtrie says the app also allows students to report suspicious activity, send their location to security staff in the event of an emergency and a sexual assault button is directly connected to 911. A safety toolbox, equipped with a flashlight and personal alarm, is also provided, as are links to support services and maps.
SFU also has an app for emergency messaging. “We’re trying to add more features to it to draw more users,” says LaLonde.
Empowering students
While campus security teams are adopting new tools, students also need to do their part to help keep themselves
and their classmates safe. “We all have a level of responsibility in keeping our own security,” says Patton. But it’s up to the security departments to communicate important safety tips to the students.
Patton elaborates, “A typical security group in terms of being proactive would always be giving the advice of locking up laptops, don’t leave things lying about, lock your door to your residence room, lock your car, make sure you hang on to your valuables, that kind of stuff, and I don’t think that has changed so much.”
LaLonde, who also sees safety and security as a shared responsibility, says faculty need to do their part as well, by learning where the emergency escape routes are, as well as the defibrillators. “Look at our online training materials around active threats, our emergency plans; what would you do if somebody had a heart attack in your classroom or there was some sort of event?”
Bradley-McMurtrie also stresses the importance of faculty and student orientation. She and her team go to a friends and family orientation for first year students to fill them in on the safety app, security resources, safe zones and how to deal with emergencies.
As for returning students, they have videos they are required to watch prior to starting school. She says pop-up lunch and learn drop-in sessions are also helpful, as are giveaways, iPads for example, which can help keep a busy student body engaged.
Patton says student engagement is a challenge for her team as well: “They’re very busy young people, they’ve got lots on the go, so they don’t necessarily engage in the same way that I do as a working professional.”
LaLonde says, “We look at a whole variety of ways to get the message out to students throughout the year. We’re at all the different student events with a booth. When there’s a student fair we’ve got a booth at that. We’re constantly trying to get in their face.” He says his team is also engaged in a postcard campaign to educate students on emergency response.
While the tried and true methods of generating awareness still work, security departments are increasingly connecting with students online.
“We have online reporting, we have social media pages for students
so we can connect with them that way, through Facebook and Twitter, as well as Instagram,” Bradley-McMurtrie says.
Patton says her team has had to become more savvy with social media: “We do have one or two staff that try to stay engaged in it…we’re trying to become more accepting of getting information via email, via social media, so students, that’s how they reach out now.” She says one of her department’s goals is to expand its online presence going forward.
Creating a partnership
While reaching out to students, both in-person and online, is a means of education, it can also help facilitate a better relationship between a campus security department and the students it is protecting.
Bradley-McMurtrie says her department has tried to be more accessible to students, with full service security desks in hallways. “We’re no longer behind a door…we are the first people that you see now, for assistance. We’re there to say good morning, have an interaction, not just security-related questions.” She continues, “We want to be seen more as a partner, rather than enforcement.”
Outreach to international students is particularly important to BradleyMcMurtrie’s team since, “depending on which country they come from, they might not have the trust of their local police or security in their own country.” Her staff makes an effort to explain their role and how security can support these international students.
LaLonde concurs that it is important not to be seen as an enforcement group, and stresses the importance of working with students, both by utilizing student safety patrollers and working with SFU’s undergraduate and graduate student societies. These student societies have been invited to take part in safety and emergency planning, and a new security hiring process had two student representatives on the interview panel. “They had an equal voice,” LaLonde says. “It worked really well, they were great; I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Patton agrees that a healthy partnership with students is crucial: “We’ve got 16 staff here that are out 24/7, but they can’t do it all on their own. Educating people to be their own best friend in these things and looking out for each other and working together with us, all of those things are still very important today.”
Conestoga’s Doon campus in Kitchener, Ont.
