Journalist Nidhi Razdan issued a statement on Twitter today, claiming she had been the victim of a sophisticated phishing attack that falsified an offer to her to teach at Harvard University.
Razdan said she has now filed a police complaint to "get to the bottom of this attack".
Razdan had quit NDTV, where she had worked for 21 years, last June, announcing that she was "changing direction" to join Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences as an associate professor.
According to her statement today, she was supposed to join the university in September 2020 but was then told her classes would commence in January 2021 due to the Covid pandemic.
"Along with these delays, I began noticing a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me," Razdan wrote. "At first, I had dismissed these anomalies as being reflective of the new normal being dictated by the pandemic, but recently the representations being made to me were of an even more disquieting nature."
Without going into details, Razdan said she reached out to "senior authorities" at Harvard and shared correspondence she thought she'd received from the university.
"After hearing from the university, I have now learnt that I have been the victim of a sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack," she wrote. "I did not, in fact, receive an offer by Harvard University to join their faculty...The perpetrators of this attack used clever forgeries and misrepresentation to obtain access to my personal data and communications and may have also gained access to my devices and my email/social media accounts."
Razdan said she filed a police complaint and wrote to Harvard, urging them to "take the matter seriously".
Read Razdan's statement in full:
