Church Identity Scam hits UUCW

All, the office received an email this morning, purporting to be from Aaron, with the address of “pastoralsaint12 at gmail dot com”, which is not an email address Aaron has ever had. (UPDATE: We’ve had reports that the address “churchreverend01 at gmail dot com” is also being used) The text says:

“Good Morning Jennifer,

Get back to me as soon as you receive my message, I have a task for you to help me carry out urgently, I can’t be on the phone at the moment, Just reply me on here.

Blessings,

Rev Aaron Payson”

This is an all too common scam which is intended to collect the contact information of the people who reply to it, either to try to get the people to send money fraudulently, or to sell the contact information on.

Please always be careful and cautious about responding to any email that asks you for money in any form, or that comes from an address that you don’t recognize. If you have any doubts, always feel free to forward the email to Aaron () or I () to double check that something is legitimate. Here is some good information about how to protect yourself from this type of scam: CLICK HERE

If you receive one of these emails, please forward it to me so I can keep track of them. Always feel free to report anything suspicious like this to us so we can let our members and friends know to watch for it.

Jennifer Landry, Office Administrator

*For those wondering, I typed the email address like that to prevent accidental clicks on it, and also to prevent it from appearing on the internet in any search engine as a legitimate address.