Pastor scam gift card emails
Greetings!
An email scam disguised as from Pastor Katie has been received by several church members and staff. This continues to happen all over the world. They take on many forms, but a common one is indicating that the Pastor is raising funds through your purchase of gift cards. This is a scam email, and Katie wants you to know that she would not send out something like this.
While not new, gift card scams are on the rise and can result in a victim losing hundreds or thousands of dollars. In a typical scam, an employee receives an email that pretends to be from their boss or another senior figure or person of authority. It asks them to buy gift cards and send them photos of the backs, for reasons that will supposedly be explained later. The scammer may even ask you to communicate with them via text message.
How to Spot a Gift Card Scam
- Inspect the sender's email address to confirm it's actually coming from that person. Scammers will often send the email from a random email account and change the Display Name of the email address to either your boss, supervisor, or director.
- The email message likely will:
- Indicate some level of urgency, such as indicating they are in a meeting or are heading into a meeting and need your help ASAP.
- Possibly not include the sender signature, but rather "Sent from my iPad" in order to make it appear as if the person is mobile and away from their desk.
- Ask you to do them a "favor".
- Ask you to purchase numerous gift cards with the promise of reimbursement.
- Possibly have typos and grammatical errors.
- Appear to be sincere
What To Do
- Ask yourself, "would this person really ask me to do this?"
- If you are unsure if the message is legitimate or fake, call the person and ask.
- Do not reply to the email.
- Do not purchase any gift cards.
- Delete the email, or block the address and then delete it (never respond or click a link).
Please note, the ability of fraudsters to send messages that appear to be from others doesn't mean somebody's account was jeopardized--there are many ways emails and phone numbers on caller ID can be faked. And sometimes, just the name is used with a different email address.
