During this season of giving, don’t get taken

At our church on a recent Sunday morning, the rector delivered a startling message during the announcement period:

“I want to make clear to you that I will never, ever ask you to buy iTunes cards and give them to me,” the Rev. Elizabeth Marie Melchionna told the congregation.

She went on to explain that a number of parishioners had received email messages from someone impersonating Melchionna. If the parishioner replied, he or she was asked to buy iTunes cards that the church could give to the needy. The email directed the purchaser to scratch off the redemption code, take a cell phone picture and send it back via email.

It is a scam, of course. What’s startling is the number of people in this one church alone who were contacted. Melchionna said she’d heard from about 60 parishioners who had received the emails, and some had taken the bait. One 90-year-old woman bought four $100 iTunes cards and delivered them to Melchionna. A parishioner in his 70s bought $200 in cards.

In this season of giving, it is disturbing but sadly not surprising that evil lurks online to take advantage of people’s charitable inclinations. It is particularly galling that crooks would impersonate faith leaders to take advantage of our giving instincts.

“It is a transgression of the trust that exists between a religious leader and the parishioner,” Melchionna told me.

The scam isn’t confined to our church. Melchionna said she’d heard from other clergy whose identities had been appropriated by scammers. In North Carolina, the “pastor phishing” scam seems to have started in Catholic churches in Charlotte and Greensboro, then quickly spread to other denominations and locations.

“It’s not unusual for someone to impersonate some trusted person like members of the clergy” to exploit people’s generosity, said Laura Brewer, communications director at the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office. She said the AG’s office can’t do much about it because it’s hard to trace the scammers, who often are located in other countries.

Email card scams are on the upswing nationally, resulting in warnings recently by Apple and other retailers, the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC issued a report in October noting that consumer losses from gift card fraud totaled $53 million in the first nine months of this year, up from $27 million in all of 2016. They accounted for 26 percent of fraud incidents reported to the FTC this year, compared to just 7 percent in 2015.

“Con artists favor these cards because they can get quick cash, the transaction is largely irreversible and they can remain anonymous,” the FTC said. .

The sad part about the fraud is that victims usually can’t get their money back. They typically use their bank credit cards to buy the iTunes cards, and once the iTunes cards are redeemed, banks won’t refund the buyers their purchase.

That’s what happened to the parishioner who bought iTunes cards for Chapel of the Cross. She was out the $400 she spent, which is so galling to her priest.

“It was infuriating that these very people for whom we are praying, someone else is out there preying on them,” Melchionna said.

What can you do? Not much, except be diligent. Warning signs are unusual emails from a church, generic language that isn’t personal to you (and often contains grammatical or misspelling errors), and fake return addresses.

It’s a shame to have to be suspicious during the holidays. But you should.

Ted Vaden, of Chapel Hill, is former public editor of The News & Observer.