New SCAM with the Same Goal of Separating You from Your Money or Tricking You into Providing Your Personal Information
The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and Spokane Valley Police want to warn people of a new twist to the annoying SCAMS we’ve all received. It appears these criminals are using publicly accessible information to identify and contact family members of people who were recently arrested. They then call the family members, identify themselves as a Sheriff’s Office employee, and try to fraudulently gain payment with a promise to get the arrestee released early. In addition to money, the scammers ask for personal information that could expose their potential victim to identity theft/fraud.
This is another SCAM!
The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and Spokane Valley Police continually receive reports of scammers trying to trick potential victims into fraudulently paying fines/fees to avoid arrest or some other threat. This is by design, as the scammer is trying to use fear and confusion to cause panic to pressure the target of the scam into falling for the deception and potentially making a costly mistake.
Thankfully, in this newest version, a family member did the right thing and called the Sheriff’s Office to check if this was a scam using a phone number they independently located.
The person targeted by this scammer said he called and identified himself as Sergeant Young with the Sheriff’s Office. The criminal impersonator told them that a family member had been arrested and jailed for DUI. He provided the correct name of the arrested person, probably obtained through publicly available sources, while trying to coax the potential victim into paying $1,250 for monitoring fees, promising to release the family member after the payment was received. The scammer said payments could not be accepted by credit/debit card and could only be made with an electronic funds transfer or an online payment platform such as Venmo, PayPal, etc.
Thankfully, the person didn’t make a rash decision and, despite the shock and initial panic, began to think critically about the specifics of the scammer’s story and became very skeptical. They told the fraudster his information didn’t “sound right” and that she’d contact the jail directly, and hung up.
She also told a Deputy that another family member received a similar call, where the scammer asked for specific information about the arrestee, which would have been readily available to him as a jail or Sheriff’s Office employee. Fortunately, this second family member was suspicious and did not provide or confirm any personal information that could have been used later to commit identity theft.
This scammer’s story is fictitious but might not be readily apparent to most people, especially when the scammer is exploiting feelings of shock, fear, and confusion.
Always, if you receive an unsolicited call, text, or email from a business, government agency, banking institution, or law enforcement agency, where they are demanding immediate action (call/click) to provide payment or personal/banking information under threat of negative consequences, it’s probably a scam.
Stop, think, and take the time to look up the entity’s contact information personally. Using it, call directly to verify if a scammer just targeted you.
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This Spokane County Sheriff Office news article "New SCAM with the Same Goal of Separating You from Your Money" was originally found on https://www.spokanecounty.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?CID=7