Just to say that there is someone posing as me out there and sending emails requesting money (a £100 Amazon voucher for my niece!). Please ignore and delete.
After a few quiet weeks it's started again - local church office
holders such as churchwardens, treasurers etc. have received fraudulent
email messages impersonating members of the clergy, typically in their
own parish but sometimes more widely, asking for a variety of things
including the purchase of vouchers and gift cards.
There have been
some close calls with one church office holder actually having spent
quite a lot of their own money, but fortunately discovered before it was
too late.
The sender has taken some trouble both with identifying
their chosen pseudo-sender and the intended victim (we guess someone is
trawling parish church websites). In many cases the sender has used an
un-traceable gmail address.
In several cases the first message
reads "Do you have a moment I have a request I need you to handle
discreetly. I am currently busy in a prayer session, no calls so just
reply my email."
A reply then draws the recipient into a dialogue
in which they are encouraged to buy vouchers, and ultimately send images
of their serial and security numbers to the fraudster.
If you
think you have received one of these messages you can report this to the
police on their non-emergency 101 number. They will pass it on to
Action Fraud, a national agency. It may not help you directly, but by
increasing the number of reports we make sure that they continue to take
this seriously.
No one at St Wilfrid’s - the clergy, the PCC or
its officers - will ever ask anyone to spend their own money in an email
– and therefore anything purporting to do this is a fraud. This is a
low-tech solution – and it’s roughly what the big banks do when they
keep repeating that they will never ask for login details by email, and
will never ask you to move money to a different account by email.
Blessings!
Revd. Pete
