JERSEY Chamber of Commerce has issued a warning to its members after details from its website were offered for purchase.
In an email sent to members of the Island’s key industry groups yesterday morning, Chamber explained that it had fallen victim to “data scraping” – a process which involved publicly available email addresses of members being harvested from the website and packaged for sale.
Some members were also sent invoices from the same company for £175 and follow-up emails chasing payment, Chamber confirmed.
The matter has been reported to the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner for the unlawful processing of membership data, and Chamber’s own data protection managers, Propelfwd, are trying to contact the perpetrators.
The email continued: “To be clear, this is not a data breach or any lapse in our own security. This list contains publicly available email addresses.
“We would strongly urge you not to respond to these emails, but to delete them and treat any invoices with suspicion and regard them as ‘scam emails’.”
Chamber advised members to forward all emails relating to these scams to their data protection managers at Chamber@Propelfwd.com, who are collating the complaint for the JOIC.
