Christian Aid is subject of grant spam email
Howard Lake | 25 January 2007 | News
The latest spam email to use a legitimate charity’s name without permission is one that claims to come from Christian Aid’s Board of Trustees, offering £850,000 in “charity donations/aid from the Christian Aid (UK)”.
The spam email has been engineered to appear to come from “ch*******************@ch**********.com”, which is a domain name used by the unrelated US nonprofit “Christian Aid USA”, but in fact it comes from the less credible “en*****************************@ya***.uk”.
The recipient of the charity’s apparent largesse is addressed only as “Dear Sir/Madam” and the spam is full of common hallmarks of such messages including widespread misuse of capital letters and a careless approach to accurate spelling and grammar.
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For example: “Christian Aid (U.K.) a Multi-Million Pounds NGO group was Established with the objective Of Human Growth, Educational and Community
development.”
Apparently the grant comes from “the Christian Aid (U.K.) in conjunction with the European Council” and there is a total of “Eight Million Five Hundred Thousand Pounds Sterling as specific Donations/Grants to 10 lucky International recipients world wide in different Categories for Business development and Social.”
Recipients can apparently use these funds freely “for your business And educational development, charitable work and your Community development at large”, which would suggest that Christian Aid’s charitable objectives have been stretched somewhat.
Even better is the rationale for being awarded such a ‘grant’: “Your Email was selected Based on an internet random Selection exercise”, a new approach to professional grant-making.
As with all such email scams, the sender advises secrecy on the part of the recipient: “You are by all means advised,To keep this whole information confidential
until you Have collected your grant, this is to avoid double And unqualified claim, due to beneficiaries informing Third parties on cash grant donation.”
UK Fundraising decided not to comply with this secrecy rubbish, so looks like we won’t get our £850,000. At the same time we’ll avoid the attentions of a scam artist trying to convince us to part with tens of thousands of pounds before we get our money.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.