Ottawa, Canada - Canadian government officials and NGOs say they have been spammed by bogus emails that claim to be from Falun Gong practitioners. Some of the emails are ludicrous, some even threatened the recipients.
One recent email sender had fraudulently used a Falun Gong practitioner’s name, with the IP address originating in Hebei Province, China. The message started out, “I need your help,” and was sent to several Members of Parliament, as well as Ottawa city council members, Nobel Peace Prize nominees, and other prominent Canadians who have expressed their support of Falun Gong in the past.
A number of the recipients have forwarded the emails to the Falun Dafa Association (FDA) in Canada. The FDA said the messages are inconsistent with Falun Gong principles and are meant to make Falun Gong look bad and hurt their reputation.
Wayne Marston, a Member of the Canadian Parliament, received such a bogus email and forwarded it to the FDA.
Marston said he was disturbed that someone stole practitioners' names and sent irritating emails to people in Canada.
“I understand that Falun Gong is based on an ancient culture of cultivation. ... Even worse, this type of hate material was sent in the name of an organization that they don’t belong to.” Marston told the FDA on June 26.
Former MP and Secretary of State, David Kilgour, and prominent human rights lawyer, David Matas--both of them Nobel Peace Prize nominees and the authors of Bloody Harvest, the killing of Falun Gong for their organs--said they also received similar messages.
Kilgour said the emails were irrational, fanatical, and even threatening.
Matas told The Epoch Times that he had received many emails of this nature since April. The emails said that if Matas did not practice Falun Gong, he and his family would suffer terrible consequences, and if he didn’t reply to the email, he would “face difficulties and big suffering.” Matas also expressed his belief that this may be the latest attempt by the Chinese regime to discredit Falun Gong.
“I can see that these people are pretending to be Falun Gong practitioners. Maybe the Party thinks they can fool people by this sort of technique,” Matas said.
Government officials and VIPs in the U.S., France, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand also received similar emails in recent months.
Ms. Dai Gongyu, a spokesperson for the Canadian Falun Dafa Association told The Epoch Times on the telephone that since the Chinese Communist Party began persecuting Falun Gong on a large scale in 1999, it has tried many different ways to discredit Falun Gong overseas. In the past, Chinese diplomats directly sent messages to Western politicians, spreading lies and hatred about Falun Gong. But as more Westerners gained awareness of the true situation of Falun Gong, the Chinese regime realized that this method no longer worked, so they now pose as Falun Gong practitioners and attempt to discredit Falun Gong’s reputation through these nasty emails.
“The principles of Falun Dafa are Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance. The practice is entirely voluntary. We do not threaten or scare people into practicing Falun Dafa. The sender [of these emails] is definitely not a practitioner of Falun Gong,” Dai said.
Mr. Matas, who has even received death threats for his work of exposing the forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese state, said in a previous interview with The Epoch Times: “I think over the years, the persecutors do not necessarily remain fixed in the techniques of persecution, they remain fixed in the ideology of the persecution. Their techniques are changing in order to adapt to resistance. What they see is that what they tried in the past hasn’t worked, and they are trying something new.”
Dai also asked Canadians to report these emails to the Canadian FDA and local police departments so the police can investigate them.