If you’re an avid reader of the East Baton Rouge Planning Commission agenda, you may have noticed a recent change.
The applications typically linked to the agenda are no longer there. The commission removed the documents from the internet a few months ago following an email scam.
Assistant Planning Director Vance Baldwin tells Daily Report that several applicants in one day received emails from a fictitious email address pretending to be from the Planning Commission asking the applicants to pay an invoice.
“Since that’s outside of our normal operations, they checked with us and we looked to see what could be done,” Baldwin says. “It was a crafty scam that hit a few people on a national and regional scale. We found some with almost the same footprint in Utah. New Orleans got it as well.”
The incident occurred in the Capital Region about four months ago and Baldwin says they pulled the applications offline immediately.
“We determined they were pulling information from our agenda and then sending it to the property owner and applicant information that was available,” Baldwin says. “We had to proceed with the agenda language for legal requirements, but the applications were not required to be up there.”
The Planning Commission still provides access to the applications through public records requests.
The party responsible for the scam was not caught because the email address used was untraceable.
Baldwin says there are no immediate plans to return the applications online.
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