Phishing is an email message sent by scammers to trick you into revealing personal information that can be used to commit fraud. In April, the University of Wisconsin System (UWS) began a System-wide phishing awareness education program in which simulated phishing emails have been sent to all UWS faculty and staff on UW System campuses.

The UW System campaign’s email messages mimic real phishing threats. UWM recipients can simply report the simulated phishing email messages, as they should with all phishing email messages. If you are using Outlook on the Web, you can mark an email as phishing, if you are using the Outlook desktop application you can mark it as junk. Please review our procedure for reporting phishing emails.

If a UWM recipient does inadvertently click on a link contained within a simulated phishing email message, that UWM staff person will be routed to a phishing awareness education webpage that alerts the staff person that they have been phished. The webpage will highlight the suspicious aspects of the phishing email that the recipient may have missed.

How to Spot a Phishing Email:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes
• Urgent language prompting immediate action
• Request for confidential information

Don’t click any links or reply to a phishing message!

Please contact the UWM Help Desk at 414-229-4040 if you receive any suspicious email or if you would like more information regarding this topic. Please review our procedure for reporting phishing emails.