The odd wrong number, a silly story someone thinks needs covering, these are part and parcel of the business of running a news platform.

But every so often someone goes above and beyond what we usually come across – like the strange request we received in November of last year, where a reader asked us to hack her boyfriend’s phone (HERE).

We thought that one would take some beating, but then someone rolled in and blew it out the water.

This is the first email we received on January 31st – innocent enough, although we’ve redacted the name for obvious reasons:

Good day.

I’m XXX.  From Cape Town, South Africa. I would like to know if you can post an add asking people to hack in on something for me. I’m willing to pay R1000-R2000.

Not really our vibe, dear reader, but we thought we would take it for a spin and requested further information.

Nothing came of it, until this morning just after 9AM. Email two:

Hi

Can you maybe hack into a university system and maybe accept me as a student at UCT.

Honestly, that happened. A mere seven minutes later:

Hi

Can’t you maybe forge an acceptance letter from UCT to me?

Again, this actually happened.

Now we figure this person has enough to worry about without us passing on their details to either the university or the police, and maybe this can serve as something of a PSA.

Sorry students out there unable to land a spot at university, we’re not in the business of hacking IT systems and forging acceptance letters.

In fact we’ve teamed up with NEWORDER to try and prevent this kind of thing from happening, imploring businesses and institutions to make sure they have themselves covered in the event of someone trying to sneak in the back door.

Verifying whether the best practices and appropriate security measures are in place to mitigate and minimise the impact of known and unknown security risks, their service delivery comprises of hands-on experience within the Information Security and Digital Forensic environments over a period of more than two decades.

Basically, if they’re on your side you can rest easy no one is going to crack the codes and cause havoc.

Or worse yet, enrol at your university when they don’t know the abbreviation of ‘advert’ only has one ‘d’.

We’re here if you need our help, UCT.