We have received a number of reports of what is known as a spear phishing scam.
In a spear phishing scam, someone known is impersonated, typically through an email account, in an attempt to gain access to sensitive information, to get you to transfer funds, or to get you to purchase and transfer gift cards.
In many situations, attackers have created Gmail accounts that resemble the names of the Bishop or District Superintendents. Using data located in the conference journal, scammers have distributed emails from these impersonating accounts asking for the purchase of Walmart gift cards for COVID patients, with the promise of reimbursement to the targeted recipient, and in some cases the possibility that the recipients of the email can retain one of the gift cards for their own use.
If you receive a message like this, or a report from someone else, please ask the recipient to forward the message to incident@inumc.org and report the email to Gmail using the “report as phishing” option in Gmail, as seen in the attached image.