Last month I wrote about some spam that I had seen hit a microfinance platform, well now I am seeing it in another form.  Yesterday I was going through my emails, when I saw an email that I thought was from Kiva, but it just didn’t look right.  I decided to cautiously open it just to be sure.  The email turns out to be from a company called “Kiva Micro Financial Loan Company.”  Once seeing the details of the email, it was obvious that it was a scam that was phishing for information.  In my case, as with many I am sure, since I was opening it with gmail, I received warning that I should be cautious opening the email.  However,I’m sure there are many people who don’t have the same security settings that I do, and might be getting caught by this.  It is a shame seeing scams hit the microfinance world.  Most people don’t get caught by them in this day and age, but the scammers will keep trying to impersonate lenders and organizations to trick people, and all it takes is a couple of the wrong people to get scammed and it will make microfinance look bad.  If anybody sees any other form of Microfinance scams, please share them with the group.

At some point, everyone has received an email or message, whether it be through facebook, gmail, MSN, etc, from an annonymous person saying that they would like to meet up.  I think most people know the trick by now, but every once and a while, it looks real.  Earlier this month, I received an email on Wokai that I got a message from a new user.  I didn’t recognize the name, but luckily I was busy and didn’t open it.  It was a spam email that was sent out to all users.  I don’t think the email would have done too much harm, but it was unexpected to see it within the microfinance community.  Wokai, had caught this the next day and had done a great job of sending out a formal apology and letting everybody know of the incident.  I’m not quite sure what all it entails on the backend to help stop this in the future, I’m sure Wokai has already solved it.  The spam wasn’t a big issue, but it sucks to see that it is in microfinance as well.  I’m sure it has already happened a bunch, but this was one case that didn’t get caught by any of my filters either, so it stood out.  I think with the close circle of people in the microfinance community, as well as the smart people building out platforms/MFIs, we can narrow down the spammers, but it just sucks knowing that first time lenders could get a spam email and get discouraged.  Props to Wokai for handling the situation so professionally.