As every company or organisation, EXARC too is susceptible to phishing. Usually somebody receives an email, which seems to originate from an EXARC official, like the chairperson, treasurer or director. In this email, the author (the scammer) tries to win the confidence of the reader and persuade them for their personal (financial) gain. The scammer will try to convince you to pay a sum which they pretend is for something useful. However, the only use it has is themselves.

Usually, the target of those phishing emails are EXARCs own board members and other team members. However, over the past few months, also many EXARC members were included in these attempts to get financial gain. The thieves go very far to make up a story, they look up a lot of details so their emails look very trustworthy.

Our website was not hacked for this - the thieves collected a lot of information and went to great lengths to convince you to pay them. Now that this is happening more often, we have downgraded the information we have of each of our members on our website, limiting it to text, images and where needed, links to websites or social media profiles. So email addresses are no longer visible on our members' profile pages.

This will not stop future attempts from people pretending to be an EXARC official or trying to use your link with EXARC in a too good to be true (or too bad to be true) story to make you send them money. You should never fall for that, be aware that this is the reality we all live with, EXARC or not.