VOL. 134
The Vermont Cynic ISSUE 28
Porn in the workplace A former UVM employee admitted to watching porn at work. The incident will be used in a discrimination suit against UVM. PAGE 4
Women and weed A female drug dealer talks about selling drugs on campus and how her gender has impacted her experiences. PAGE 6
UVM overcharged 3 / 420 Food 7 / Local eats 12
APRIL 17, 2018
Former employee sues UVM Sawyer Loftus
swloftus@uvm.edu
SCAMMED One student picked up a call she thought was from UVM police. She nearly gave away her entire savings. Sawyer Loftus swloftus@uvm.edu
Junior Allison Schwartz was doing homework when she received a call from an 802 number she didn’t recognize. She answered it anyway. “I went, ‘um who is this?’ And they were like, ‘What do you mean, ‘who is it?’ It’s the UVM police, did you not see the number come up on your phone?”’ Schwartz said. Schwartz listened as the man on the other end told her to drive to the closest Western Union and wire him all the money in her account. When that wasn’t an option, he told her to set up a PayPal account and contact her parents to ask for money. UVM police had received “multiple reports that people have been targeted by a telephone scam in which the scammers are spoofing the phone number of the UVM police,” according to a March 21 CAT Alert that Schwartz read before wiring the caller money. Caller ID “spoofing” is the altering of a caller ID so it seems like the caller is from a different number, according to the Federal Communication Commission’s website. In Schwartz’s case, an unknown man spoofed his caller ID so it appeared as 802-6563473, the UVM police phone
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number. The man on the other end of the call identified himself as Christopher Reed, a former lieutenant with the UVM police. He claimed that if she did not pay a $10,000 fine, Schwartz would be tried for selling heroin, cocaine and marijuana, she said. Schwartz messaged her mom on Facebook. The man told her what to say: that she needed to get as much money as she could if she didn’t want to go to jail. “He kept telling me to say,
“As soon as we started getting phone calls here, we decided to put something out about that to make sure people were aware that it was a scam,” he said. To his knowledge, no one at the University gave the scammers money, King said. Because these kinds of cases often involve multiple parties and come from overseas, they can be difficult to resolve, he said. King warned that if UVM police ever were to contact a student, they wouldn’t call from 802-656-3473. “Any time UVM police calls a student, it’s not going to come through as 802656-3473, which is our line for if you want to call us,” King said. Junior Jared Blodgett had a similar experience with a scam. In summer 2017, Blodgett received a voicemail from someone posing as an FBI agent. The man said that there was a warrant out for Blodgett’s arrest and left a number for him to call back. “I looked it up and it was totally fake, and I also looked up if the FBI would call someone and they never do,” Blodgett said. Blodgett said that this experience startled him and he didn’t understand why his number was being targeted.
Schwartz listened as the man on the other end told her to drive to the closest Western Union and wire him all the money in her account. ‘I have a few things I need to take care of … I will explain everything later, I just have some things I need to pay for now … Don’t worry mom, you can trust me,’” Schwartz said. The man told Schwartz he’d call her back from his cell phone. While she waited to hear back, Schwartz opened the CAT Alert sent out by the UVM police. Schwartz knew she had been scammed, she said. UVM police was quick to respond, Detective Sergeant Brandon King said.
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A former UVM employee’s gender discrimination case went to trial Monday four years after she filed the lawsuit. Former University employee Cynthia Ruescher is suing UVM for gender discrimination, a hostile work environment and being fired after she first filed the lawsuit in 2014. Ruescher, who worked in Enterprise Technology Services, claimed she was denied equal pay, equal job titles, special project work, supervisory training and bonuses, among other things. Ruescher claimed that her supervisor Keith Kennedy questioned her ability to complete a job because of her gender. Kennedy admitted to watching porn while in the office, which Ruescher’s legal team claimed created a hostile work environment. Ruescher also claimed she was defamed by her superiors, who said she was not performing adequately and deflecting work. They accused her of sabotaging the department’s computer program code. Gender Discrimination Ruescher was hired in 2001 as a senior project analyst with a starting salary of $47,000. Her co-worker Martin McLaughlin was hired in 1999 as a second level senior project analyst. He had a starting salary of $51,000 a year, according to initial hiring documents. UVM’s defense states McLaughlin was hired into this position because he had more technical experience and education than Ruescher. In Ruescher’s initial 2014 complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she argued that there was no difference between her job and McLaughlin’s. She said she should have been paid the same wage for her work. In early 2015 the EEOC sent an investigator to the University to look into Ruescher’s claims. Lucy Singer, the UVM General Counsel lawyer, said in a letter responding to the EEOC investigation that McLaughlin and Ruescher performed the same work. “The specific job title has changed at various times, but general body of work performed by these two employees is, and cont. on page 3