Church congregations are increasingly vulnerable to phishing scams aimed at stealing personal information and financial details. We have recently received reports of fraudulent emails coming from our Pastor, Rev. Kevin Long, containing DocuSign links.

These emails are not legitimate and were not sent by Rev. Long or anyone from our church office.

Please remain vigilant and verify any unexpected communications requesting sensitive information. Deceptive messages like these are an attempt to gain access to personal information. To protect yourself, do not open or click on any links in suspicious emails.

Here are some of the signs that an email is fake, even though it looks like it comes from a person or company you know:

• The sender's email address is fake. IPC Staff only uses name@ipc-usa.org email addresses. If you are unsure if any email is real, just delete it. If it is important, that person will reach out to you another way. The fake emails often have a hotmail.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, or a company name that does not go along with the person they are impersonating.  
• A simple request for a favor from a person whom you don’t regularly hear from. The message may create a sense of urgency.
• A generic subject or greeting in the email. Sometimes, there is no subject. 
• Errors in the email. The message is poorly written and may contain spelling and grammar issues. 

If you think an email might be legitimate, use another way to contact that person. Use the church website to contact IPC or to look up the email address or phone number of a staff member. 

If you’d like to know more about phishing and detecting fake emails, read more here.

There are only two things to do to a Phishing email:

• Delete it. If you can, submit it to your junk filter and report "Block Sender."
• Report the email address to the email provider using their online report websites.

Take care out there. Please don't hesitate to contact the church at any time if you suspect a suspicious email from a member of IPC staff.