(Jamaica Observer) – A number of clergymen here have fallen prey to fraudsters – some of them operating from right here on the island – who have hacked into their e-mail accounts and sought to swindle money from contacts listed in their address books.
“There have been about six or seven ministers in recent weeks, including the general secretary of the Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC), who have been affected,” JCC President Rev Karl Johnson told the Observer last week.
The other names include Revs Devon Dick of Boulevard Baptist Church; Peter Garth of Hope Gospel Assembly; Len Anglin, executive chairman of the Church of God in Jamaica; Stanley Clarke, bishop of the Moravian Church in Jamaica; and Garth Minott of the United Theological Seminary.
Detectives assigned to the Cybercrimes Investigation & Research Unit of the Jamaica Constabulary Force said they have received reports numbering into the “upper teens” from “influential people” across the country over the past year. Included in this list they said, were members of the clergy, ambassadors and their relatives, politicians, entertainment managers, lawyers, business people and at least one doctor.
“The first case reported to us was by a weather forecaster and since then we’ve been seeing too many,” Detective Sergeant Patrick Linton told the Observer.
“It’s perpetrated by persons sending phishing e-mail. It is sent to many, many persons from sites masquerading as Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo for example, to say that the particular company wants you to update your account, or to say you might have travelled somewhere abroad and your e-mail might have been compromised so you should change your credentials,” he explained.
The term phishing is the process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as user names, passwords and credit card details by pretending to be a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication environment. It is a world-wide phenomenon which is usually done by e-mail or instant messages but also occurs with banking and other sites that require financial information.
“The page with the request will look like [the legitimate one] with all the logos and the updates field so you put in your current password and there’s also a field to enter the new one. When you hit that submit button however, the information does not go to Microsoft or to Yahoo but redirects to another address,” Linton explained.
