If you receive an email from a reverend with a Gmail account, you can guarantee you’ve been hit by a scam.

Features of a scam are:

  • Large church who are running a large conference as they want to do something different.
  • Have substantial sponsorship so fees are not a problem.
  • They are promising about 600 people in attendance, yet there is no reference to the conference on the church website.
  • Church and leader exists and have a website, but the email is with a Gmail account.
  • American spelling is used despite being in the UK.
  • There will be a clause that says the following “All travel arrangements such as Flight fare, Speaking fee deposit as well as Hotel accommodation will be taken care of by us as soon as you honor this invitation. The events committee will send you all binding documents including a Letter of Invitation and Contract Agreement as well.”
  • Scammer will eventually request bank details for a payment of flights (I suspect, as you do, they just want your bank details) and they will extract attendance fees from attendees who turn up to an event that will never happen.

Click here for more detail.