One student thought so.

According to the daily crime report compiled by Campus Police, a student reported that on Feb. 12 two men convinced him to hand over his ATM card in exchange for a “reward,” which he later found was really a handkerchief and cut-up newspaper intended to look like a large sum of cash.

Unfortunately, the scammers withdrew almost 600 bucks from his account.

“That’s called your typical flim-flam fraud and he’s not the only student it’s occurred with, unfortunately, over the years,” said Captain Robert Lowell of Campus Safety Services. “We put something out about it every semester and people still fall for the trickery involved.”

Lowell said that the people who commit the frauds are very experienced, often convincing their victims by using fake accents and saying they’re from a foreign country.

“People act as though they’re from another country and they’re lost and they have a large sum of money and ask if someone will hold the money,” explained Lowell. “And before they leave they talk about a security – ‘I’m giving you my money can you give me something of potential value,’ and generally it has something to do with an ATM card.”

He said people typically wait for about an hour before they realize they’ve been victimized and that it happens often across the city and country, but that students at big universities are particularly suscpetible because many are from suburban areas where they have little or no experience with this.

So be forwarned, learn fast, and please, hang on to those debit cards, kids. Really.