Faith Works 1-16-2026
Jeff Gill
A message for anyone & everyone to hear
___
Imagine we had a fellow going around door to door, talking fast and smiling large, claiming to be a cousin of Prince William who had a plausible if unlikely argument for why you needed to loan him a few hundred or thousands of dollars.
And that this hypothetical person had done this scam successfully not dozens, but hundreds of times, perhaps upwards of some thousands of fleecings, always getting away and never getting caught.
We'd be asking hard questions of law enforcement and the prosecutor's office, who would have done something (in all fairness) after just a few repetitions, but in the case I have in mind are still helpless to respond.
Because I'm talking about messaging or text or email scams, and the perpetrators are almost without exception in Russia or Myanmar or Nigeria and the like. Overseas criminals with a talent for electronic larceny.
We have pages for crime and legal matters, and this sort of thing has been covered by the Advocate and Dispatch before. What I'm most exercised about though is the way faith communities get targeted by these approaches. They're nauseatingly similar in all their forms, but if this is news to you, or at most a vague recollection, let me spell it out.
Somehow, these vile malefactors get ahold of email rosters, cellphone records, or just cull membership lists and are adept enough in online skills to correlate the names of a church's most active members to the correct phone numbers.
They then send emails or texts, but texts are most common, and the frightful characters are well up to speed on how to make the incoming message appear to be coming from a local phone number by area code and even exchange (email scams often can be caught by simply hovering your cursor over the name, and finding the address for what claims to be Spectrum or Amazon or CVS is suffixed "btzplk54.com" or the like).
What is truly vile to me is how they all say they're your minister. They play on your desire to help, to be of service, and use just the right whiff of urgency mixed with a smidgen of how they're busy doing good themselves, so if you could just…
Friends, let me speak as I rarely do for ALL my fellow faith community leaders, whether priests or parsons, rabbis or imams, evangelists or bishops: we are NEVER going to ask you to buy a gift card denominated hundreds of dollars, then scratch the foil off and take a picture and send it to us. NEVER. Not once. It ain't us. Period, end of report.
Then the impostor-criminal will often ask us to only get, say, $200 on the gift card, but then get three or four or eighteen of them. They know the amount which triggers the manager to come out, or loss prevention to step up to our frantic tapping on the kiosk. But never mind all that: texts asking you to buy gift cards and then photograph numbers off of them and send back? THOSE AREN'T US. I promise you. If you get a text asking for an emergency pound of ground coffee, maybe. But gift cards? IT IS A SCAM.
But a bright spot. I was recently near a person who said at a gathering they were in the middle of one such scamming-in-process. I was immediately aware (don't even whisper "gift cards" and "minister" within 50 yards of me), rudely intruded into the conversation, and here's the hope. These scams are industrial scale in size wherever they are being done. We called the person's credit card company, and the numbers hadn't been processed, and the transaction was blocked. Once they do, you can't get the money back, but they get backlogged. We moved just barely fast enough.
Better yet? Don't get sucked in. Your minister is not texting you for gift cards. Tell your friends.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's rethinking his opposition to the death penalty for this particular offense. Tell him about scams you've avoided at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
Jeff Gill
A message for anyone & everyone to hear
___
Imagine we had a fellow going around door to door, talking fast and smiling large, claiming to be a cousin of Prince William who had a plausible if unlikely argument for why you needed to loan him a few hundred or thousands of dollars.
And that this hypothetical person had done this scam successfully not dozens, but hundreds of times, perhaps upwards of some thousands of fleecings, always getting away and never getting caught.
We'd be asking hard questions of law enforcement and the prosecutor's office, who would have done something (in all fairness) after just a few repetitions, but in the case I have in mind are still helpless to respond.
Because I'm talking about messaging or text or email scams, and the perpetrators are almost without exception in Russia or Myanmar or Nigeria and the like. Overseas criminals with a talent for electronic larceny.
We have pages for crime and legal matters, and this sort of thing has been covered by the Advocate and Dispatch before. What I'm most exercised about though is the way faith communities get targeted by these approaches. They're nauseatingly similar in all their forms, but if this is news to you, or at most a vague recollection, let me spell it out.
Somehow, these vile malefactors get ahold of email rosters, cellphone records, or just cull membership lists and are adept enough in online skills to correlate the names of a church's most active members to the correct phone numbers.
They then send emails or texts, but texts are most common, and the frightful characters are well up to speed on how to make the incoming message appear to be coming from a local phone number by area code and even exchange (email scams often can be caught by simply hovering your cursor over the name, and finding the address for what claims to be Spectrum or Amazon or CVS is suffixed "btzplk54.com" or the like).
What is truly vile to me is how they all say they're your minister. They play on your desire to help, to be of service, and use just the right whiff of urgency mixed with a smidgen of how they're busy doing good themselves, so if you could just…
Friends, let me speak as I rarely do for ALL my fellow faith community leaders, whether priests or parsons, rabbis or imams, evangelists or bishops: we are NEVER going to ask you to buy a gift card denominated hundreds of dollars, then scratch the foil off and take a picture and send it to us. NEVER. Not once. It ain't us. Period, end of report.
Then the impostor-criminal will often ask us to only get, say, $200 on the gift card, but then get three or four or eighteen of them. They know the amount which triggers the manager to come out, or loss prevention to step up to our frantic tapping on the kiosk. But never mind all that: texts asking you to buy gift cards and then photograph numbers off of them and send back? THOSE AREN'T US. I promise you. If you get a text asking for an emergency pound of ground coffee, maybe. But gift cards? IT IS A SCAM.
But a bright spot. I was recently near a person who said at a gathering they were in the middle of one such scamming-in-process. I was immediately aware (don't even whisper "gift cards" and "minister" within 50 yards of me), rudely intruded into the conversation, and here's the hope. These scams are industrial scale in size wherever they are being done. We called the person's credit card company, and the numbers hadn't been processed, and the transaction was blocked. Once they do, you can't get the money back, but they get backlogged. We moved just barely fast enough.
Better yet? Don't get sucked in. Your minister is not texting you for gift cards. Tell your friends.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's rethinking his opposition to the death penalty for this particular offense. Tell him about scams you've avoided at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
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