Yesterday my parents in Rexburg got a call from a “public defender” telling them that their grandson Eric was in jail in Canada and needed them to wire money for bail. Luckily they did not. Today I see that the same scam is working in Utah. The caller had a TON of information about my parents and the grandson it would have been easy to be fooled.
Well, look at the scam alert that the Orem Police Department posted on their website:
Another Orem couple fell victim to the Grandma/Grandpa scam. Here’s how it works;
-You get a phone call from your “Grandson”
-The caller knows the name of your grandson and sometimes even sounds like him (Info can be bought)
-He claims to have been arrested in Canada and he needs money to get out of jail and to fix his car
-He asks you to send money via Western Union to Canada
- If you send money to him in Canada, there is little to no chance of getting your money back or of someone being arrested
Please be wary of this scam, it still works sometimes so the bad guys will keep trying.
Posted by OremDPS
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It WAS all he had to say about it!
:@:)
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This has been an ongoing scam for many years and originally started out as a “parent scam”.
Kinda like the ole Nigerian check scam, they go away for awhile but often pop up like a bad rash from time to time.
Thank god my grandparents are completely paranoid. They’d never fall for something like this. The people who pray on the elderly are sick and pathetic. One hopes karma comes around….
It’s sad that so many people fall for this, yet if it didn’t work so well, scammers would not be doing it. It is also amazing how much information is out there that they can access.. In working with ID theft, I see this happening all the time, what most people don’t understand is that ID theft is different from being scammed. I am in the process of doing a story about Medical ID Theft, with Channel 3 News. Anyone willing to talk to me, please contact me at my site or the email address provided.
This is just sick. Add these scammers to my ‘list of people deserving of the death penalty’.
Yep, I have one of those…
Someone tried to pull this on my grandmother. She didn’t know it was a scam at first, because the voice sounded so much like her grandson. But she got suspicious because the caller wasn’t using words her grandson would use and called the police. Shame on these people!!! Part of the susceptibility of the elderly is that their hearing may not be real good either so they think it’s their own fault they’re not recognizing the voice.