Ver­non Khelawan

Af­ter more than a decade of e-scams, most of which orig­i­nat­ed in the Unit­ed King­dom and in many of the larg­er cities in Africa, scam­mers have now dragged the name of the Ro­man Catholic Church in their quest to fraud­u­lent­ly wrest mon­ey from un­sus­pect­ing vic­tims.

Since the mid-90s, peo­ple all over the world have been del­uged with e-mails, all aimed at ex­tract­ing one's hard earned mon­ey. The cre­ativ­i­ty of those cy­ber thugs has al­ways been amaz­ing–that some­one could sit down and think up so many var­i­ous ways of ex­tor­tion, be­cause that is what it is pure and sim­ple.

These tricks range from try­ing to trans­fer very large sums of mon­ey left to heirs be­cause of threats from gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials; in­her­it­ed mon­ey but since ill­ness has be­fall­en the own­er, it has to be giv­en to char­i­ty; to lot­tery win­nings from games in which you nev­er par­tic­i­pat­ed.Un­flat­ter­ing­ly, the per­son re­quest­ing your as­sis­tance in the dis­pos­al of these funds don't know you, have nev­er met you, have nev­er spo­ken to you. So the ob­vi­ous ques­tion. Of all the mil­lions of peo­ple in the world why me?

So while the big mon­ey is the lure, what they try to get from you is per­son­al in­for­ma­tion and some small change to fa­cil­i­tate trans­fer costs among oth­er things. Do the math. Mul­ti­ply the small change by thou­sands and it con­verts to big, very big change, while the e-mail re­cip­i­ents are left to cry at their loss­es.

Now a strate­gic change has evolved. The church now seems to be a good rip-off medi­um. I re­ceived an e-mail last week from an or­gan­i­sa­tion called The Catholic Char­i­ty Foun­da­tion (CCF), which ac­cord­ing to the piece of cor­re­spon­dence is based at Catholic House, Ox­ley Road, Off Leeds, Mill Lane, ub67hq Lon­don, Unit­ed King­dom. It was dat­ed April 28 and signed by a Rev Thomas De Maria. I be­lieve that both the ad­dress and the sig­na­to­ry do not ex­ist.

Open­ing para­graph states, "This is to no­ti­fy you that you have been cho­sen by the Board of Trustees of the Catholic Char­i­ty Foun­da­tion, Unit­ed King­dom, as one of the re­cip­i­ents for 2013 Cash Aid for your own per­son­al ed­u­ca­tion­al and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment."

The let­ter then gives a bit of his­to­ry of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, which it claims was found­ed in 1936 with the aim of "hu­man growth, pover­ty erad­i­ca­tion, ed­u­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment."

It lat­er stat­ed that the Unit­ed Na­tions (UN) and the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) was do­nat­ing 500,000,000 British pounds to­wards the CCF's 77th an­niver­sary as spe­cif­ic cash aid to more than "250 in­ter­na­tion­al re­cip­i­ents world­wide in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories for busi­ness, ed­u­ca­tion­al and per­son­al de­vel­op­ment and more­so, at least 30 per cent to be used by each for the de­vel­op­ment of his/her com­mu­ni­ty."

But here is the clinch­er. "Based on the ran­dom se­lec­tion ex­er­cise, from the CCF prod­uct pur­chase re­ceipts and the In­ter­net IP ad­dress­es," stat­ed the let­ter, " you were se­lect­ed among the re­cip­i­ents to re­ceive the sum of 6,000,000 UK pounds as cash aid from the do­na­tions of the UN and the EU in ac­cor­dance with the en­abling Act of Par­lia­ment.

"The Catholic Char­i­ty Foun­da­tion," con­tin­ued the mis­sive, "is one of the nu­mer­ous bod­ies in­volved in the fight against glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis. In line with this we re­solved to em­pow­er on­ly re­cip­i­ents with laud­able cre­den­tials, skills and ex­pe­ri­ence in lead­ing/man­age­ment so as to en­sure ad­e­quate util­i­sa­tion of the cash aid and al­so to en­sure that the ben­e­fi­cia­ries will in­vest in or­gan­i­sa­tions that will in turn pro­vide job op­por­tu­ni­ties for them­selves and their com­mu­ni­ty at large.

Fi­nal­ly, the let­ter sug­gest­ed that I con­tact my Cash Aid doc­u­men­ta­tion of­fi­cer (Catholic Aid Ad­min­is­tra­tor Unit­ed King­dom) and it pro­vid­ed some mail and tele­phone and fax de­tails.Just to let my read­ers know I have not replied to the e-mail.Do you think I lost 6,000,000 UK pounds? I don't think so. Just an­oth­er cy­ber scam to ex­tort mon­ey from peo­ple any­where.