My wife chairs a church committee which raises a few thousand dollars a year for local causes. For several weeks, the committee’s secretary, treasurer and publicity chair have forwarded to us emails supposedly sent to them from my wife, asking her to send them gift cards to be used for some allegedly good purpose. They’re not fooled. The email addresses from the scammer or scammers differ. After several emails over several weeks, I’d expect them to give up. I’ve thought of emailing the perps, suggesting they give up, perhaps from my own fake address. I can’t see any benefit to involving law enforcement. Is there anything else we should be doing?
Sorry, but there’s nothing productive you can do. The scammers couldn’t care less what you think or how effective it is—it’s almost certainly automated. And no, law enforcement won’t do anything since no one has actually been harmed.
Just make sure all the people who receive them are trained not to fall for the scam.
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And definitely don’t reply or otherwise respond to the emails. At best they’re from fake addresses so you’ll just be wasting your time, or they’re from real addresses that let the scammers know they’ve found a real, monitored address, or worse, they’re from some unrelated third party’s address who you’ll then be spamming.
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You can create reports at https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/.
A single report won’t start an investigation, but if they get a lot of reports, they might. And if your reports can be associated with an existing investigation (maybe as a result of a powerful person being defrauded), then your report may help supplement the evidence they’re using to prosecute the case.
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If the “allegedly good purpose” mentioned in these fake emails refers to any specific legitimate charitable organization(s) (outside of the church in question, that is), you might contact the organization(s) in question to let them know their name is being used in attempted fraud. Unless they’re one of the big ones (such as United Way or American Red Cross), though, they probably don’t have much if any resources allocated to fraud prevention. And if the “allegedly good purpose” doesn’t mention any specific legitimate organization(s), then that’s futile anyway.