Small Nonprofits: Beware of this Scam

There is a new scam going around where small non-profit organizations are being targeted by a “Barbara Moratek” of the “Ivete Foundation."  If you google the name, it leads to malware.  Here's more.  Hat tip Bill Snyder.

Comments

[Craig Weinrich]

Thanks for this alert. I did get the email yesterday, and although I'm the accidental techie, I replied back asking "her" for more information. I never thought to google her first. Now it appears that our server is acting as a zombie and sending out bunches of emails from pointbank.com. I'm not sure if they are related, but this is something we can investigate!

[Judi Sohn]

As I monitor our organization's info@ inbox, I got the email yesterday too. Like Craig, it didn't even dawn on me to check up on "her." I did reply naively asking what specific information she wanted to know.

We get inquiries like this all the time, asking either about our organization or about colorectal cancer, so I didn't think anything of it until the same question arrived at a completely unrelated email address so I had a hint it was something shady but I couldn't tell for sure.

I wonder how many other e-scams are out there targeting non-profits? From time to time we get one from some poor soul who is dying of cancer and wants to leave us a few million in their will, but needs help covering the legal fees to set it all up.

[Jeff Trexler]

Thanks for calling this out. The splog references to ivetefoundation.org are fun too. "It might be something good it might be something not so good." Indeed!