Scammers have found a new hunting ground at Cal Poly, and they’re hiding in plain sight.
Fraudsters are infiltrating GroupMe chats and digital spaces that students rely on to connect with clubs and organizations, impersonating their peers with convincing fake profiles designed to fly under the radar.
Annika Bullock, the Associated Students Incorporated (ASI) officer for the Technical and Professional Communication Club, says the deception can be surprisingly polished.
“They’re always like fully formed college student-looking profiles,” Bullock said. “It’ll be like a profile picture they probably pulled from the internet of someone who’s roughly 18 to 24 and like an average name, and they’ll have like, a little profile attached to it that says they go to the school. Minimally, it makes them look like a student, even if you’re a club that’s trying to vet the people who join.”
The scams range from fake parking passes to counterfeit concert tickets — common, high-demand items that make the pitches feel plausible to busy students.
Ashlyn Van Gorkom, a Cal Poly sophomore who interns with the District Attorney’s Cyber Forensics Lab, has reviewed student scam cases time and again and says they follow a predictable playbook built around urgency.
“Scammers are very good at this, and they also know that there’s kind of this very small 24 to 48-hour window in which law enforcement can stop money transfers,” Van Gorkom said. “If you’re outside of that window, it’s really, really hard to get money back.”
Jay Camerena, a history sophomore, came dangerously close to learning that lesson firsthand. A message in her PCV GroupMe offered a discounted parking permit with a casual enough tone to read as a real student’s message.
“Parking permits are really expensive, so I was like, that actually seems like a good deal,” Camerena said. “But then they got kicked from the GroupMe, and I was like, wait, that’s actually a scam.”
A common misconception is that scams primarily target older adults. However, younger victims are increasingly in the crosshairs, and even a small misstep, like jokingly responding to a scam text, can have lasting consequences.
“Now you are telling these scammers that this is an active number,” Van Gorkom said. “Once they learn that that’s an active number, they have these massive sheets — hundreds and thousands of phone numbers, emails, names, all these things that get passed around between scammers.”
According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, internet crime cost Americans more than $20 billion in 2025, underscoring just how high the stakes have become.
Bullock has taken cybersecurity and engineering courses, but her bigger concern is for students experiencing these digital spaces for the first time.
“There are freshmen in our chat who have never been in one of these group chats before,” she said. “It does feel really worrying when we say, ‘We’ve invited you to this space.’ So it’s kind of just like a responsibility thing of trying to make sure that whatever we can do to prevent that happening, we do.”
Mismatched email domains, unverified sellers, and payment requests through Zelle or Venmo, platforms that offer little to no reversal options, are all red flags worth heeding.
As long as student platforms remain open and unmonitored, experts warn the scams will keep coming.