system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Strange contact from fellow PhD student

So this is a slightly odd one. I'm currently a PhD student who's trying to get some tutoring work outside of my studies and as a result have joined a tutoring website where tutees can contact me to organise sessions for help in their studies.

Yesterday I received a message on the website from someone who claimed to be from my university (but a different department on a different campus, I'm at quite a large university). They told me their department, listed extensively their data and problems that they were having and, in very broken English which was quite hard to understand, seemed to suggest that they wanted me to write their results and discussion section for them for an unspecified piece of work.

After chatting to some colleagues they seemed quite concerned by this and some suggested maybe contacting this person's department to let them know that someone is attempting to get others to do their work whilst also disclosing quite a bit of data.

I'm unsure if there is a real issue that needs be reported here or not so any help or opinions would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!
gpt
Ummm yeah, that raises several red flags. To be honest, it could be a mistake where they didn't ask what they meant due to English being a presumably second language. Ask if they meant what they said, as it's possible they might have been asking for something more innocuous than what it sounded like. If it turns out that they want to send you non-anonymised data to analyse and write the results for, definitely contact their department because that shit is not cool, yo.