The University of South Africa (Unisa) has warned current and future students against a fake admissions message which is doing the rounds online.

“Be Alert: Fake messages are being circulated promising automatic admission for higher certificates students who completed higher certificates. Please treat those messages as fake news. Only use Unisa official communication platforms for Unisa official announcements,” the university writes.

Accompanying the written warning is a screenshot which seems to be a post on a Facebook Group showing off the fake message.

Unfortunately Unisa was rather liberal with the big, red “fake news” stamp over the message so we can’t see all of its details.

It seems that students are encouraged to download some kind of form and send it to an email address.

Curiously a seemingly legitimate Unisa email address is provided, as unisa.ac.za is the real domain used by Unisa (as you can see on the contact page) and this specific address was listed on an external site as legitimate a couple of years ago.

If this is some kind of nefarious scam or plan to extort students even a real email address could be used such as a mailbox the fraudsters know is full which would cause emails to bounce back. This kind of misdirection usually leads to victims directly messaging the scammers at which point the con can continue.

We’re not saying that’s what is happening here, only that it’s a possibility to explain why a screenshot provided by Unisa as illegitimate would contain a real email address.

Even if the post itself is not nefarious and simply misinformed, it is a good idea to heed the original warning and only go through Unisa itself for certain actions like applications.