Small Charities Coalition (SCC) members were targeted by scammers over the weekend, after hackers compromised the umbrella body’s emails.
An email claiming to be from a member of staff at the SCC, and asking for money, was sent to some charities on Saturday afternoon.
The SCC alerted its members to the scam later that afternoon, and confirmed that trustees had reported the incident to the “appropriate external bodies”.
Scam
An email sent to SCC members by Rita Chadha, chief executive of SCC, on Saturday said: “It appears that this afternoon an email has been sent out claiming to be from the Small Charities Coalition asking for payment.
“This is not from the Small Charities Coalition, and appears to be an email scam. Please do delete it from your system.”
The SCC did not disclose how many of its 14,000 members had received the phishing email.
Reported
In a statement to Civil Society News, the charity’s trustees said: “On Saturday 20 February the email account of one of our SCC staff members was compromised via a phishing scam.
“We instantly contacted our IT partners to assess the extent of the breach and simultaneously communicated with our members telling them what to look out for and what to do.
“We have already taken measures to enhance our security to ensure this does not happen again.”
Asked whether the breach had been reported to the Charity Commission or Information Commissioner’s Office, they said: “We are engaged in the reporting process in relation to the appropriate external bodies and are following the post incident procedure as set out by our IT partners.”
Related articles
