TV Anchor Quit for Harvard Job. Then She Noticed 'Anomalies'

Nidhi Razdan of NDTV says she fell victim to a 'sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack'
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 18, 2021 11:00 AM CST
Updated Jan 23, 2021 3:35 PM CST
TV Anchor Quit for Harvard Job. Then She Noticed 'Anomalies'
Harvard University's library and campus at night.   (Getty Images)

Nidhi Razdan spent 21 years as the lead anchor of India's NDTV, which one might think would give her the chops to take on a position as an associate professor of journalism at Harvard. In fact, in June she said she was giving up her job to do that very thing, beginning in September, per Boston.com—or so she thought. On Friday, the 43-year-old revealed a "shocking development" on Twitter: There was no job. In fact, the school has neither a journalism department nor employs journalism professors. Razdan had fallen victim to a "sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack" that unspooled over the course of six months. As she was readying herself for her new gig—and appearing on TV and at events under the title "associate professor of journalism at Harvard," per the Boston Globe—she learned her start had been pushed to January 2021 due to COVID.

But per her tweeted explanation, she also "began noticing a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me." She initially dismissed them as being part "of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic, but recently the representations being made to me were of an even more disquieting nature." So she reached out to Harvard for clarification and learned Harvard hadn't made such an offer or been a part of any of the communication. Razdan tweeted that "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." She has filed a police complaint; there is of yet no word on who might have been behind the scam. (Here's another painful phishing story involving journalists.)

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