‘Victim of phishing attack’: Nidhi Razdan who quit NDTV for teaching at Harvard says the job offer was fake

By Online Desk
Journalist Nidhi Razdan, who had quit NDTV after a 21-year stint to take up a teaching job at the prestigious Harvard University last year, has said that she was a victim of a sophisticated phishing attack and that the job offer was fake.

The former NDTV anchor, who hosted the programme Left, Right and Centre, in a statement on Twitter revealed that she has not officially received a job offer to join Harvard University as Associate Professor of Journalism and that perpetrators of the attack have used careful forgeries and misrepresentation to access her personal data.

Nidhi Razdan’s statement 

“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 anamolies 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 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.”