I live in a metro area and receive a weekly publication that posts current events around the city. In the paper there is a small section of police reports that have been made to local authorities that warrant being published. Generally they are ridiculous stories that sometimes are hard to believe they are real but they are.
Recently I’ve noticed every week there is at least one telephone scam reported that just makes me gasp at how obvious it sounds yet folks are still clueless to the mechanics of the con that they fall for such an obvious telephone spam scams.
One common factor in these is that the scammer is posing as police, FBI or IRS agents calling residents demanding gift cards and threatening jail time unless victims comply with their demands.
Two recent incidents the scammers convincingly posed as FBI employees and local police detectives. The victims were duped because the caller ID displayed the local police departments telephone number.
In once incident the police said the victim received a call from someone who said he was the FBI Officer Daniel Stevenson. The victim told police the caller ID showed a local police department phone number. The suspect reportedly told the victim to go to two Target stores, get $2,342 in gift cards and give him the numbers or they would go to jail. The victim obviously complied with the orders given to them over the telephone.
In a second incident a victim told police they received a call from someone claiming to be a detective with the local police department. This call also displayed the local police departments phone number on the victims caller ID.
Police said the scammer told the victim that because she had not shown up for a court case they would go to jail on an outstanding warrant unless they paid $8,000 via prepaid cash gift cards. The victim reportedly did so and they also gave photos of their Social Security card and other documents as requested by the telephone spammer.
The telephone spam scammer was spoofing the caller ID.
The victim had no warrants and had never had contact with the local police department.
These scammers can be very convincing and sound official. While looking back it may be easy to blame the victims one has to keep in mind that these scammers are very successful at targeting people and the victims get caught up in the moment. They don’t stop to think about the inconsistencies or how strange the scammers story sounds until after they have lost thousands of hard earned unrecoverable dollars to the scammer.
The moral of this post is that if someone you’ve never met or has contacted you unsolicited over a telephone is requesting gift cards or any type of payment you should contact the local authorities.
The IRS, Police or local authorities will NEVER require you to pay fees or fines with iTunes, gift cards or any product purchased for a big box store (Target, Wal-Mart etc.).
Leave a Reply