IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM PASTOR ED - RE SCAMS

Dear RJC Friends - first off, this message is coming directly from Pastor Ed. In case you are wondering if this is legit, I'm writing this at my standing desk in my office and looking at a bunch of legos and Scout's dog bed in front of me.

The reason. I share that is because there is a scam message that many of you have received from someone impersonating me. I'm going to first tell you what to do and then I'll explain it. If you want the larger explanation, read the whole of the message. If you simply want to know what to do, read the bold-print part just below.

If you received a message that says it was from me that begins with

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Wishing you joy, peace, and a fresh reminder of God’s love today. ?" ....

this is not a message from me. It is a scam.

Do not reply and delete the message

If you did reply and have been asked to purchase gift cards and send the codes, do not do it

If you have purchased cards and sent the codes already, immediately contact wherever you purchased the gift cards and see if they can cancel them and refund your monies.

What to know going forward

NO ONE from the church staff will email you or text you and ask you to purchase gift cards or do help with an assistance request in this way.

Church staff will only email from the resoundingjoy.church email addresses or directly from our church management software (which will come from mailsystem@fluro.io).

If you have any question of whether a message you get from a church staff member is legit, do not reply to the message but instead start a new message or a call directly to that person.

This is unfortunately an all-too-common scam that is being directed at faith communities. LITERALLY EVERY Pastor, Rabbi, and Imam friend I know has had this happen within their faith communities. Here are two links that tell more detail about it.

FTC.gov 

United Methodist Church
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Ok - for those who want more detail read on.

A few notes about this scam:

Your email has not been hacked nor has mine. There is no personal information that has been stolen from you. There is no virus or malware that has inftected your device/computer.

The way that the scammers have done this is through a combination of freely available information on church websites, social media, etc and also using readily-available AI tools.

One vector for this is literally someone walking into the church on a Sunday morning and walking out with a church bulletin or a copy of the church directory. This is also why our church directory is not available on our church website but it is possible that someone could have walked in and picked up a paper copy.

As you can see from the links above there is little that authorities can do on this because the scammers create fake anonymous email addresses and once that email address is reported as a scammer, they just create a new one. Remind me to tell you sometime about the conversation I had about this with the Ft Thomas Police Department.

As I noted above, this has happened to EVERY faith community and every religious leader I know. It has happened with Lisa Allgood's messages from the Presbytery of Cincinnati, from colleagues here in Colerain, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, this is part of the world that we live in now.

In summary, if something feels weird, it probably is.

Pastor Ed