Surprisingly, a well-known social media platform's official customer service sent a notification for "Li Gui"?, The new semester has started

As the new semester begins, there is a resurgence of online fraud or false advertising targeting parents and students. When investigating the traps of "fake teachers inducing parents to pay" and "training institutions using the name of schools to promote courses", the Shanghai debunking platform found that some social media platforms have loopholes, and seemingly legitimate home school contact channels may also pose risks.

"DingTalk Secretary" said the teacher called you for a meeting, can you believe it?

"Our school's home school communication is mainly conducted through 'DingTalk', but the 'DingTalk Secretary' often sends notifications such as' homework group 'and' class meeting group 'to verify with the teacher, and it is found that none of them were sent by the teacher." A reader provided a clue.

Coincidentally, as a parent, the reporter also saw the relevant notice on DingTalk platform. After investigation, it was found that some functions of the platform provided opportunities for criminals to take advantage of.

"DingTalk Secretary" often pushes official information from the platform. When users join home school groups or other group chats, "DingTalk Secretary" will also automatically push information, reminding them that "you have joined * * groups/* * organizations" and so on.

Since the end of last year, "DingTalk Secretary" has sent several messages to reporters. Some have claimed that the reporter has "joined" School Homework 4 ", while others have said" Li Bai invites you to join "Connected Campus 4", "Zhang Guifang invites you to join" School Parent Group 3 "," Class Representatives invite you to join "Mathematics Homework Correction", and some have reported that "Chinese teachers invite you to join the group for a meeting... Click on the card to fill out the service registration form and enter" Invite Student Parents and Teachers to Join the Group for a Meeting ", enjoying exclusive account opening services.".

The reporter also received several notices from the "DingTalk Little Secretary", all of which were related to children's learning from their names

Among the teachers of journalist children, there are no "Li Bai", "Zhang Guifang", "Teacher Li", etc; I sought confirmation from the school and was informed that these groups had never been organized before, and the notification was not sent by the school. Strangely, in these groups that use the name of the school, journalists are labeled as "* * mothers".

Why do these unfamiliar organizations know that journalists are "* * mothers"?

The investigation found that some groups have very simple information prompts, but they are very outrageous. For example, "Connecting Campus 4" is "Unrecognized Education of Hedong Junior High School", "School Parent Group 3" is "Unrecognized Songyuan Civil Engineering", and these organizations have no connection with the school of the journalist's child; The most outrageous is the invitation for a meeting issued by the "language teacher", which is from an Internet company in Jinan. However, according to the industrial and commercial registration information, this enterprise has applied for simple cancellation on November 2, 2021.

According to the "Qixinbao" query, the company that issued the meeting notice had applied for simple cancellation 2 years ago

Why can unfamiliar "teachers" and organizations unrelated to the school use "DingTalk secretaries" to send messages to parents and know their identity? Why can companies that have already applied for simple deregistration still push notifications to student parents under the guise of "teachers inviting them to join a group meeting"?

Even without an answer, the limited amount of information currently available is enough to raise awareness among parents and children: these groups are unreliable.

Seek platform customer service to verify authenticity, authorize personal information first?

The reporter attempted to contact the official customer service of DingTalk to get to the bottom of the matter, but unexpectedly encountered many twists and turns.

Firstly, the "DingTalk User Manual" provided by the "DingTalk Secretary" shows that when users encounter problems and suggestions while using DingTalk, they can only contact the "My Customer Service and Help" platform through their mobile phones, but the platform does not currently provide a service hotline.

The reporter could only contact "My Customer Service" through the "User Manual", but found that users must be authorized to follow the "DingTalk Customer Service" service window in order to receive content push notifications and service notifications. That is to say, before contacting customer service, users are forced to become fans of "DingTalk customer service".

Next, the "DingTalk Customer Service" page shows that the platform has a hotline customer service, with a phone number of 400-11-6555. After dialing, they were informed that the service is only available on weekdays from 9:00 to 18:00; When making a call during a specified time period, the call is automatically answered, which roughly means that the business is currently busy. Please contact online customer service.

So, can "online customer service" provide services 24 hours a day? The reporter attempted to contact online customer service, but was reminded that if you want to use the service, you must first sign an "authorization agreement" - "The information you inquire about in this service window may be synchronized with the product service provider who provides the customer service platform, so that the relevant product service provider can retain and process your inquiry messages for this and subsequent services.". The content that the reporter wants to inquire about involves push notifications from unknown organizations, and they do not want to provide personal information and consultation content to the advertising push party, so they choose to "refuse". Who knows, without authorization, further information cannot be obtained.

As a last resort, reporters can only choose to agree to authorization and ask three questions to customer service: 1. Who is DingTalk Secretary? 2、 Why was it that I was notified by DingTalk's secretary to join a homework group unrelated to my child's school, and received a meeting notice from a teacher I didn't know? 3、 Why do strangers know that journalists are "* * mothers"?

The respondent is still a robot and cannot answer; After the reporter entered "manual customer service", the system displayed that manual customer service is only available from 8:00 to 18:00 on Monday to Sunday.

At the designated time, after a long wait, the reporter finally contacted the human customer service of DingTalk. For the three questions, the customer service provided the following answers:

"DingTalk Secretary" is the official service of DingTalk; Being notified to join various "groups" may be due to the other party entering the wrong phone number and mistakenly adding a journalist. If they do not understand the relevant organization, the journalist can choose to refuse to join the group or voluntarily exit after joining the group; The customer service did not directly answer the third question, only stating that users can use privacy settings to refuse others to find themselves through their phone numbers, refuse others to view organizational information, and block invitations from non colleagues or non friends.

Customer service stated that "DingTalk Secretary" is an official service

DingTalk supports strangers to search for users through their phone numbers and invite them to join groups

DingTalk customer service did not directly answer how strangers obtained the journalist's identity information

But when the reporter checked his own settings, he found that he had already set his privacy information within the minimum visible range.

The privacy settings of journalists have always been within the minimum visible range

So, the reporter posed a hypothesis to the customer service of DingTalk: can users fabricate the name of a company or organization and invite people with known phone numbers to join the group, while DingTalk does not verify whether the company or organization is legitimate? Can these invitations also be sent through "DingTalk Secretary"?

Regarding this, customer service stated that "creating a company in DingTalk is not required, and a business license is required for enterprise certification.".

The customer service representative stated that when creating a company on DingTalk, there is no review process and only certification is required to obtain a business license

This answer also explains why journalists receive many unverified "home school groups" and "class groups" - the platform does not have any review mechanism.

Through sorting out the entire process of the journalist's investigation, it can be found that DingTalk has the following problems:

Firstly, it is difficult for users to obtain manual customer service, and in order to obtain the service, they must first authorize personal information.

Secondly, building groups or organizations in DingTalk does not require platform authentication for their names, so criminals may have the opportunity to use the school's name to create groups and mislead parents and students.

Thirdly, "DingTalk Secretary" is an official feature of the platform, but notifications sent by organizations that have not been audited and certified can also be pushed through "DingTalk Secretary", which increases the difficulty of user identification and allows criminals to take advantage of it.

Fourthly, DingTalk supports users to search for other users and view their public information through their phone numbers, and invites strangers to join organizations or groups.

So, from the journalist's personal experience and investigation, parents and students should pay attention that they cannot fully trust the learning information and learning groups pushed by DingTalk Secretary; If any information related to event organization, fee collection, etc. is found in these group chats, it is even more important to confirm with the real teacher and be careful not to be deceived. Furthermore, users should pay attention to privacy protection and reduce the possibility of being pulled into groups by strangers or organizations.

Of course, it is necessary for DingTalk to review relevant loopholes and not be exploited by criminals.

Be careful, fake class teachers and these tricks

DingTalk is just one of the social tools. Nowadays, more and more home school contacts are conducted through social media platforms such as group chats. Because of this, in addition to using official assistants to release information to induce parents, criminals also target various "communities" and find opportunities to set traps for students and parents. In response, Tencent's security team introduced the tricks of some community "fake class teachers"——

The first step is to try to join the group.

Criminals cast a wide net to search for QQ groups without established verification mechanisms or with less strict verification, and then quietly enter the group.

For WeChat groups that require scanning codes or being invited to join, criminals will start with students who use their phones in public places and without supervision, using excuses such as "giving game tools", "upgrading leap", and even "free transformation" to lure children into inviting them to join the class WeChat group. Alternatively, parents can be induced to join the class group through training sessions, such as trial listening.

The second step is face changing surgery.

After entering the class group, the criminals do not immediately deceive, but hide in the dark, secretly observing the words, deeds, and daily routines of the real homeroom teacher, downloading the homeroom teacher's profile picture, and waiting for the opportunity to act. When the class teacher is busy in class, criminals change their group chat avatar to the class teacher and change their name to disguise themselves.

Step three, Shuanghuang Xiu.

After changing their faces, the criminals will issue notices of tuition fees, information fees, and attach payment QR codes. If someone has doubts, they will reply to the message in a timely manner, stating that everything is true; There may even be another "scammer account" participating in the group, using the "double reed show" to dispel parental concerns.

Dining in batches, dining separately

Although the criminals have carefully designed, these scams still have loopholes. Network security experts remind that just three tricks can effectively avoid "fake teachers" and "fake home school groups"——

The first move is to activate the group verification function in the home school contact group. Other parents and students should also be vigilant and not allow strangers to join the group, fundamentally preventing illegal elements from setting traps in the group.

The second trick is for the group leader to periodically check the composition of the class group and school group members, and promptly invite suspicious group members out.

Third, the school should release payment and activity notices through more than two official channels, such as "group news+paper notice", "group news+official account/official website notice", "group news+school gate notice", etc., to facilitate parents' and students' verification. If parents receive suspicious notifications, they should also proactively contact their homeroom teacher or school manager to verify the authenticity of the information.