Friends,

There appears to be an email scam going around that impersonates United Church ministers and targets their church members, asking them to buy gift cards. A few ministers in our regional council have reported it, enough send a small message to our mailing list with the reminders:

  • Use a critical eye and trust your gut whenever you get an unusual email — like staff asking for cash, gift cards or Bitcoin.
  • Closely check that the ‘local-part‘ and ‘domain name‘ in the email matches the actual name of the staff person or church from whom the email is supposedly sent.
  • Also check for oddities in the email address (spelling mistakes in the name, unusual phrasing, from a public domain name such as gmail or hotmail, etc).
  • Don’t reply to the suspected email. Start a new message or call the staff person whom the email was supposedly sent from, to check if they actually sent it.
  • Report any phishing and spam emails to Google – it does actually make a difference.

United Church of Canada staff will never ask for secrecy or help. UCC fundraising and donations are always through legitimate channels (PMRC’s CanadaHelps.org portal, Mission & Service). You can always call the regional council office, or local church office, to check the validity of an email or request.

Easter blessings,
PMRC Office

What are the parts of an email address called?

Looking at our own office email address as the example pacific.mountain@united-church.ca:

  • The part before the ‘@’ is the local-part of the address: pacific.mountain
  • The part after the ‘@’ is the domain name to which the email message will be sent: united-church.ca

What is phishing

“Phishing is a type of online scam where criminals impersonate legitimate organizations via email, text message, advertisement or other means in order to steal sensitive information. This is usually done by including a link that will appear to take you to the company’s website to fill in your information – but the website is a clever fake and the information you provide goes straight to the crooks behind the scam.” – from Webroot.com

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