A fraudster has been sending scam emails posing as the Montclair Planning Department and requesting payment, township officials said on Friday.
The township’s information technology department notified local police, and the detective bureau is investigating, township spokesperson Matthew Amaral said.
A police department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for additional information Friday afternoon. However, town officials warned people not to be duped.
The Montclair Township Municipal Building at 205 Claremont Ave. (FILE PHOTO)
The fraudulent email lists itself as being from “From: Planning Department Township Of Montclair Planning.TownshipOfMontclairNJ@usa.com,” the officials said.
“The message includes a fake invoice requesting payment by wire transfer,” the town said in its statement. “This email is not from the Township. Do not open any links or attachments, and do not reply, send payment, or share any personally identifiable information.”
The town advised people to mark the phishing messages as spam and delete them.
David Genova, principal of Greenwood Development, was puzzled when he received the email.
“I’ve done 30 plus projects in town, and I’ve never seen an email like this, and I’ve already paid my application fees and escrow fees, so I went: ‘What is going on here?’” Genova said.
His attorney told him that other clients also had received similar messages.
Officials said that for verification, people may call the Planning Department at 973-509-4954.
A person answering that phone number said Friday afternoon that he’d been handling permit applications throughout the day and was not aware of the scam emails.
Montclair’s Hacking History
In 2023, the township suffered a cyber-attack, causing the township to pay a $450,000 ransom. Officials later said that the hackers gained access to residents’ personal financial data in the “data security incident.”
Montclair Local asked Amaral if the recent incident was related to the 2023 data breach. He did not immediately have an answer on Friday afternoon.
Genova, however, said that based on what was sent to him, he believes the scammer pulled information about his planning board application from a public facing portion of the town’s website.
“The information that they have is all readily available from the portal,” he said.
Towns commonly post planning board applications on their municipal websites so that the public can know what is being developed and who is building it.
Email reporter Matt Kadosh at matt@montclairlocal.news
An example of the phishing email:
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