When David Ogan, a priest in the Orthodox Church in America, had a family emergency while traveling, fellow Orthodox from around the country were willing to send money to help. They took his calls, heard the story of what happened, and wired him the funds he needed right away. After all, the church upholds acts of mercy, a selfless form of Christian love in action.
Except the calls weren’t from Ogan, and there was no emergency.
When Ogan started getting calls directly from concerned Christians—Was Father Ogan all right?—the Clarksville, Tennessee, priest immediately recognized the situation as a scam. But how?
At first, Ogan thought the scammers were impersonating an uncle who shares his name and runs a prison ministry in Nashville. But then, Ogan learned they had shared his address, the name of his church, and even his children’s names in their calls.
One of their targets, Philip Kontos, a priest in Florida, estimates he sent $650 by Zelle. The scammer claimed to be Ogan calling from a relative’s phone. Kontos sought to verify the story before he sent anything, but the scammer’s story matched Ogan’s details in the Orthodox Church in America’s expansive online clergy directory. Sending help by Zelle made sense, given the urgent need the man described.
Only after he’d sent the money—and a follow-up call went unanswered—did Kontos start to wonder. When he dialed the number for Ogan in the online directory, Kontos reached the real priest and learned the truth.
Welcome to clergy-impersonation scams, a widespread but targeted form of phishing.
Similar scams use the names of bosses, banks, or family members to seek money transfers, financial details, or gift cards. Criminals can play on an additional level of trust and the inherent generosity in church communities when they simulate requests from a member’s pastor or priest.
According to the annual data book put out by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), impersonation scams were the second most common complaint in 2023, after identity theft. That year, the FTC received 853,935 complaints of imposter scams, amounting to losses of nearly $2.7 billion.
Those are only the complaints on record; a 2021 study found only 4.8 percent of people report their experience with fraud to the Better Business Bureau or a government agency.
“It’s a very underreported crime,” said John Breyault, a fraud expert and vice president at the National Consumers League. With fraud, “we tend to blame the victim,” which leads to silence.
Neither the FTC nor the National Consumers League tracks clergy impersonation specifically, but these scams target Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches in states from Alaska to Missouri, Texas to Florida.
“He used all the right words; he used the terminology,” said Kontos of the man who called him at 3 a.m. one day, claiming to be Ogan. “He used a nickname for the wife that was appropriate. … He seemed legit.”
Possibly, the scammer gleaned the term matushka, a word many Orthodox Christians use for a priest’s wife, from the directory, which provides detailed information about each clergy member in the United States. Public listings include an address (sometimes one’s home), phone numbers, emails, and the name of the priest’s wife, if he’s married.
In Levelland, Texas, a small town west of Lubbock, Presbyterians have a much different set of common terms. But scammers got close enough to pull off a fraud there, too. Cindy Terzenbach, a long-time parishioner at First Evangelical Presbyterian Church, said all the details sounded plausible when she got a text from someone who claimed to be her pastor, Jon Sharpe.
According to the message, he was in a meeting but needed her help with something. “I would jump in front of a truck for him,” Terzenbach said. Tired from an early day that started at 4:30 a.m., she didn’t at first ask “her pastor” why his number had changed.
His request to buy gift cards seemed plausible, based on a prior church job she’d had. One text even pledged to send a prayer letter with the cards, “which sounds like something he would do,” Terzenbach said.
“What these scams rely on is the criminal scammer building trust with the victim,” Breyault said. “The scammers are very organized. … Like any other business, [they] want to get ROI [return on investment],” so they do their research.
Glyn Gowing, a computer science professor who created the cybersecurity program at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, said scammers often research churches, whether through directories, social media, or other means.
“What they’re trying to do is convince the victim that the scammer is a member of this community,” he said. “One of the ways they do that is to have knowledge of other things in the church.” This might include researching differences in church terms, like matushka or prayer letter.
The second time I got a phishing text related to an Anchorage church I’m connected to, it claimed to be from the new interim pastor. A year or two before, I’d gotten a similar text that claimed to be from the prior pastor.
In the first case, I had his number and texted his wife to check if he’d changed it or had his phone hacked or stolen. But the interim pastor was so new I didn’t yet have his number. Only after the scammer mentioned gift cards did I check with someone else.
Terzenbach, unfortunately, had bought and sent pictures of three $100 gift cards before the scammer’s charade finally slipped. Then she called her pastor and learned the truth. When he said it wasn’t him, “I just started bawling,” she said. “It tore my heart out.”
Sharpe eventually reimbursed Terzenbach, one of four people at the church to get the texts. He believes the scammer got their numbers in a Telegram hack of some kind. Sharpe had asked to join a private Telegram group the very same day the texts went out.
How can churches and parishioners protect themselves? Gowing, Breyault, and others offered several tips for preventing phishing scams and protecting against fraudulent calls or messages.
Protecting Networks
Impersonator scams rely on knowledge of people’s relationships and networks. Protecting that information limits scammers’ ability to target a church or denomination.
Limit apps’ access to your contacts. Gowing said messaging apps like Telegram, Signal, and WhatsApp usually seek to access all his contacts, but he doesn’t grant that access. “I know it’s a pain” to manually add those you want to chat with, he said, but it’s safer.
Limit online access to community information, especially directories. Both Breyault and Gowing said churches and denominations should be careful what they put in publicly available listings, especially online. Gowing’s church uses printed handouts only and urges people to safeguard them. When the church issues new directories, it reminds people to shred the old ones.
At senior pastor Brad Strait’s Presbyterian church near Denver, the staff had taken precautions with their directory. But with 1,400 members, church staff couldn’t know everyone. Based on fraudulent emails and letters sent in his name, Strait believes a scammer pretended to belong to the church and got the directory from a staff member that way. As in other cases, the letters sought money through gift cards rather than parishioners’ usual avenues of giving.
Cherry Creek Presbyterian has since made its directory even harder to obtain, Strait said. The church also requires more vetting before someone can access it.
When asked about its online, public directory, the Orthodox Church in America did not answer questions. A church spokesman said by email that the church was not aware of what had happened with Ogan and had no comment.
Let people choose what to list. Gowing, at LeTourneau, said he doesn’t include his phone number in his church’s directory. Strait said that after scammers accessed the Cherry Creek Presbyterian directory, the church gave its members more choice in what their listing shows.
The Orthodox Church in America did not answer questions about how much choice its clergy have over the details included in its public directory.
Encourage discretion in online posts and streams. Breyault said scammers might follow churches or even clergy on social media. If a church streams services that include detailed announcements and contact information, leaders might want to reconsider how they distribute some details.
Discretion also takes education, which Gowing’s and Strait’s churches have both provided. If parishioners like to post pictures of church bulletins online, encourage them to think before they include detailed contact information in posts.
Recognizing Scams
Even with prudence, any church that seeks to embody Jesus will at some point encounter those who seek to take advantage of its openness and hospitality. As Ogan suggested, Jesus’ advice in Matthew 10:16 applies: “Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”
Help people recognize red flags. Scammers tend to use consistent strategies. Breyault said these include a sense of urgency and unusual method of payment—for example, gift cards or a third party like Zelle, PayPal, or Cash App. The texts Terzenbach and I both received claimed the pastor needed help while in a meeting. In Kontos’s case, the caller claimed to have recently had a car accident.
Gowing said urgency is “usually a sign that something is weird, especially if you don’t recognize the phone number. Be willing to say no. … Any reasonable person, given today’s environment, will understand that you did not immediately jump and send them a $300 gift card.”
Another red flag depends on whether a church has clear processes for seeking money, helping congregants, and so on. In the Orthodox church, Ogan said priests have clearly identified people they should contact when a problem happens. If a person deviates from the typical process, it should raise a question: why?
At Strait’s church, leaders repeatedly stressed that they’d never ask people for gift cards. “I’ve said that from the pulpit; we’ve sent out an email,” he said. The church also hosted seminars on fraud to help parishioners better recognize scam attempts.
Ogan said he’s received cybersecurity training through multiple other organizations he’s worked with, but not the Orthodox Church in America. Kontos, who sent money to the person posing as Ogan, said he’s never received cybersecurity training through the church.
Slow down and test claims through other channels. Urgency discourages a holistic, thoughtful response. Slowing down allows for that. If you don’t recognize the phone number or email a “clergy member” uses, Gowing recommends calling or contacting the person through a different means. If the person claims to be traveling and unable to access their device or account, call someone else who could verify that.
At the same time the fraudulent emails started going out, Strait said his wife got a message claiming she’d won two tickets on United Airlines and needed to provide her Social Security number for a tax form. The claim sounded so bizarre they almost wrote it off as fraud. But something made them check before dismissing the email entirely.
After contacting a United executive, Strait and his wife eventually learned the contest was legitimate and she really had won! They ultimately used the tickets to visit Asia.
“So you never know,” he said, “and that’s the problem, that you have to be very careful.”
As Terzenbach warned, “You don’t know what’s real and not real anymore—especially with AI.”
But not knowing doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Ogan compared responding with heart and head to a kind of emotional sobriety. “When we forget to apply that sobriety to our core as a human being, we often get preyed upon and let down,” he said.
Using head and heart together helps avoid scams and fraud while preserving compassion and the ability to help, when appropriate. Or as Strait summarized their process, “We did not enter our data. We stopped and we talked about it.” He said they asked themselves, “How can we learn if this is true?”
Talk about when fraud happens. Breyault said it’s important for churches “to stress that this happens to everyone. Fraud is one of the most common types of scams for people to fall victim to. … If we are comfortable sharing our stories about what happened, … then we can start to see change.”
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