I feel you. I’m so glad you were skeptical .The same thing happened to a retired woman in my husband’s congregation. Someone sent her an email purportedly from him asking her to buy some Apple gift cards for him because he was supposedly in a meeting. She actually went to the Apple store and asked for several hundred dollars worth of cards. Luckily the woman working there told her to call him first, which exposed the scam.
But she almost got ripped off.