While fraud in Planning Center Giving is incredibly rare, there's always a chance your church's Giving account could be susceptible to fraudulent activity. To try to prevent this, we take extreme measures to ensure your profile data is protected from those with malicious intent. In addition, your donors' payment methods are stored outside of Giving, within Stripe, a Level 1 PCI Service Provider.
However, fraud can affect donors and churches alike, so we've outlined some steps both parties can take should they suspect fraud within a Giving account.
If you believe your card or bank account has been used to make an unauthorized donation to a church you don’t recognize, there's a good chance your credit/debit card, bank account, or email address has been compromised.
Below are some steps we recommend you take to help correct the situation and potentially prevent further fraud with your information.
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Contact your bank or credit card company immediately. Alert your bank or credit card company, and make a request to stop/reverse the charges.
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Compromised banking information is often the result of a compromised email account. Review where and how the breach might have happened by checking your email account's access history. If you see recognized activity, update your password immediately.
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Make sure to enable two-factor authentication for your email account if it's available. This will help to prevent your email from being compromised in the future.
Contact us right away if you're a Planning Center customer church and an organization listed on Planning Center is impersonating your church (your church identity has been used to create a fraudulent account). In any app, click the ? in the top right to contact support.
Please provide us with as many details as you can, including:
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The link to the donation form for the fraudulent organization.
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Tell us how you discovered the potentially fraudulent account (searching for your church online, notified by a donor, etc.)
Fraud is not something we take lightly, and we'll do what we can to help you get this issue resolved as quickly as possible.