Hey everyone, 

We’ve recently been made aware of an instance involving someone falsely claiming in an email to be a member of our staff at CKUT.

The message used made-up staff information and came from an unofficial email address. This person tried to appear as a staff member in a position that doesn’t exist at CKUT. We want to make it clear that this person is not affiliated with CKUT. 

This seems to be part of a pattern of scams, potentially created using AI, targeting creative workers like authors by offering to do promotion for them, eventually in exchange for money or personal information. Other community stations seem to be experiencing instances like these as well.

CKUT will never charge a fee for interviews, and any offers of paid promotion will only come from partnerships@ckut.ca. We will never ask for any personal information beyond what an interviewer might need for an interview.

We’re sharing this not to scare anyone, but so our hosts, programmers, volunteers, and our community at large can stay informed and know what to look out for. 

Official CKUT staff emails will always come from an address ending in @ckut.ca. That said, CKUT is also a large volunteer-driven organization and many of our hosts, collectives, and volunteers do communicate using personal email addresses. Because of this, we encourage people to please use their judgment and reach out to staff directly if something feels unusual, unsafe or potentially deceptive. 

If you receive an email claiming to be from a CKUT staff member and are not sure if it’s legitimate, please make sure to double check our staff directory, which you can find here: 

CKUT Staff & About Page – www.ckut.ca/about 

A few things to keep an eye out for: 

• Gmail or other unofficial addresses claiming to represent CKUT staff members
• Requests for money, banking information, passwords or personal information when not already engaged in conversations about donations, partnerships and/or other station business
• Staff titles or roles that are not listed on our website 
• Messages that feel unusual, overly formal, or not consistent with how CKUT would normally communicate to you personally or our community

If you receive a suspicious email or message: 

• Do not send personal or financial information
• Do not click suspicious links or attachments
• Do not reply to the email 
• Contact a member of our staff to ask questions or verify if a message or inquiry is legitimate

We really appreciate the community member who brought this to our attention and wanted to make others aware out of caution as this has also happened with other stations recently. 

Thanks for helping us keep our community informed, connected, and safe for each other. 

In community, 

CKUT 90.3 FM Staff