In the last several weeks, many of our Esperanza community members have received emails from individuals who are posing as Pastor Sarah or Robert Elsaesser or other members of our community.
Some of those emails have requested that you purchase items on Amazon or buy gift cards for something. Most of the emails have asked the recipient to spend money to fulfill a request. One such fraudulent email asked for several hundred dollars’ worth of Apple gift cards to be purchased and for the bar codes from those cards to be shared via email.
These are scams, and when you receive emails like these, please delete them. If you are not sure if the email is legitimate, you can send a new email to the person you supposedly received the email from before replying to the email in question. In all the cases we have seen, the email address used by scammers looks similar to the email address of the person they are posing as — but it is a different email.
As far as we know, no one’s email has actually been hacked, meaning that our email addresses have remained secure. Given that, a good way to tell if an email is a scam is to simply look at the email address of origin. If it is not the exact email address you have saved for that person, it is likely a scam.