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 By MICHELLE ZLOMKE
Chief Managing Editor
The pleading voice on the phone prompted Dick and Kay Towns to take quick action to help their granddaughter.
“I came in the house for lunch and Dick said, ‘Shelby’s on the phone and she’s crying. Something happened,’” Kay said.
Kay took the phone and heard the story -- their granddaughter was in Atlanta, Ga., and in jail. She needed money for court costs and a car repair bill.
In reality, Shelby, a recent Broken Bow High School graduate, was in Broken Bow, at her sister’s house.
The family was targeted last week by scam artists. In the scam, a person portrays a grandchild in distress and another portrays the court-appointed attorney.
The pair contacts grandparents and attempts to have them send money to help resolve the situation.
In this case, Kay said, a female called them Thursday and claimed to be Shelby. The girl on the phone said she was in Atlanta for a wedding and wrecked a rental car while drinking and driving.
“Then she tells us her attorney is going to call,” Kay said. “Sure enough, we got a call that said Shelby had been in court all morning.”
The person who posed as an attorney explained that Kay needed to wire $2,700 through Western Union so Shelby could leave jail.
“He was very detailed,” Kay said. “The ‘lawyer’ was on the phone with me for over 40 minutes.”
He told Kay to find a Western Union outlet, where she would receive a 10-digit access number. He would call her back later for the number so he could access the money in Atlanta.
In a hurry to help her granddaughter, Kay started making plans to wire the money to Atlanta.
She considered driving to the Western Union location in Lexington, then decided to call her son-in-law, Dan, who works at a bank in Columbus.
She knew he could quickly get to the Western Union location there, but he wasn’t available to come to the phone.
“Then, while I was waiting for Dan to call me back, I thought to call Cindy (Shelby’s mother),” Kay said. “Thank goodness for those little things.”
Kay said the girl pleading on the phone had begged her not to call her parents. Kay called Shelby’s mother anyway.
“She said, ‘Mom, I just had lunch with her. I’ll have her call you,’” Kay said.
Kay said that’s when all the red flags from the phone conversations came to light.
She immediately contact law enforcement.
Unfortunately, according to Broken Bow Police Chief Steve Scott, there is little that can be done to catch scammers in the act.
Although they said they were calling from Atlanta, Scott said it’s nearly impossible to identify which Western Union a scammer may try to receive money from.
And tracing phone calls between jurisdictions proves equally as challenging he said.
“The thing people need to do is they really need to follow up with family members and that’s what happened here,” Scott said. “Fortunately, she started thinking something wasn’t quite right.”
Shelby was by her side when Kay received the next phone call from the man posing as Shelby’s attorney. He called to request the 10-digit Western Union access code. Kay gave him a fictitious number.
He called again to tell Kay one digit was incorrect.
“He said he had gone to Western Union and one number was wrong, and I thought, ‘Buddy, all 10 numbers are wrong,’” Kay said.
At the advice of a co-worker, Kay asked the man for his attorney bar number. He gave her a number but never called her again.
Later, Kay received another call, this one from the girl claiming to be Shelby. The girl said she was “disappointed” that her grandparents had not helped out yet.
By that time, Kay and her family had plenty of time to piece all of the information together from the day’s conversations.
“I’ve had so many friends tell me there were so many red flags that things were wrong,” Kay said. “But when you are hit with something like that, you don’t think about it all.”
She said the voice on the phone sounded so much like Shelby, and the callers knew details about the family -- including the fact that Shelby had just graduated from high school.
“People need to be aware you can get on a website and pay $20 and get a family history,” Scott said. “You get get a lot of information off the Internet.”
Kay said that realization alarmed her.
“It concerned me enough that I called the bank and checked all our accounts, because if they know that about us, what else do they know?” Kay said.
Scott said he had not heard of this type of scam before, he has since seen more information regarding the “Grandparent Scam” on the Internet.
He said the most common scam he sees involves bad checks.
People receive a check for a large amount of money in the mail with a request to cash the check and keep some for themselves.
The victim deposits the check in a personal bank account, then wires money to the scammer. The victim then finds out the check is bad and the amount is deducted from their bank account, he said.
“Any time you have to give money to get money, it’s a scam,” he said. |
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