A CHURCH in south-west London lost almost £140,000 to con artists last week, after criminals posed as bank employees helping to recover funds from a decoy scam.
Two members of the PCC of All Saints’, Tooting, in Southwark diocese, were duped by the scammers, who stole practically all of the church’s funds. The church has launched a fund-raiser to help pay the bills, but hope that their bank will provide some level of compensation.
On Wednesday of last week, one of the church officers received a text message that purported to be from the NHS, informing them that they had been in contact with someone with Covid-19. The message instructed them to order a free test, and asked for bank details to pay for postage and packing.
After entering the details they realised that it might be a scam, and promptly cancelled their card. Their suspicion seemed to be confirmed when they then received a call from their bank, telling them that any accounts to which they had online access had been compromised.
But this call had actually been made by the scammers, who were using the information that they had gathered from the response to the earlier text message.
Concerned about the church’s accounts, to which they had online access, the church officer contacted another member of the PCC so that they could authorise the steps that the scammers — posing as bank employees — told them were necessary.
In reality, they were draining the church’s various bank accounts. This included the…
