According to the Patrick County Sheriff’s investigators, there are ways to avoid falling prey to scams.
No matter the training or technology scammers bring to their work, there are red flags that can warn potential victims of who they are dealing with. But before it even gets to the red flags, the best way to avoid scams is to avoid the scammers.
“If you answer an unsolicited phone call and say hello, do not say ‘yes,’” Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Kruse said. There are voice prompts that are intended to coerce you into saying yes. “On electronic calls, they want to hear you say yes. So, if you say yes, that is your voice agreeing to something, and they’re recording these calls. So, say hello. If it’s someone you don’t recognize, you can simply say you have the wrong number. If it’s someone you don’t recognize, hang up the phone. You can be rude. It’s completely alright to be rude if it’s someone you don’t know.”
Better still, “if you do not recognize the number, do not answer the phone,” Patrick County Sheriff’ Capt. Eric O’Connell said. “If it’s important enough” the caller “will text message and/or leave a voicemail. If at that point, after checking the text and/or voicemail, you recognize the person and you just didn’t recognize the number, program that number into your phone. From that point on, you’ll recognize that number.
Not answering unrecognizable numbers “is THE best line of defense initially when it comes to phone scams. You can’t go wrong with that,” O’Connell said and suggests having a healthy level of skepticism with unknown callers, because “99.9 percent, it’s a scam, and there’s .1 percent that it’s not.”
Unless you know the person and the number, for your own protection, assume it’s a scam.
“Consider everything a scam until you’re convinced that it is not,” O’Connell said.
– regardless of the type of scam.
The number one red flag to be aware of is the scammer wanting payment with gift cards.
“There is no business in America that conducts themself in that way,” O’Connell said. “It’s a guaranteed scam” and requesting gift cards for payment “is the number one red flag.”
Gift cards are a preferred method of payment for scammers because it is nearly impossible to trace them. When gift cards are used, the scammer will ask the victim to send them pictures of the card numbers.
“The very second they get that picture, those numbers are used, and that card is vacated,” Kruse said. “Making the situation even more impossible to trace is often, the scammer is not in the U.S.A. Once money goes overseas, there’s no touching them.”
If the caller suggests or demands, payment in gift cards, hang up immediately, authorities said, and it doesn’t need to be a ‘nice’ goodbye, O’Connell added.
“It’s click and block and report,” O’Connell said. Additionally, “I encourage people to call the sheriff’s office and “say, ‘hey, this number called me, and this is what this scam was’ because every week it’s something different. We see something new all the time, and yes, we see repeats, but call us and let us know, even if they were unsuccessful.”
Another red flag occurs when scammers ask for payment in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Once again, few legitimate businesses in this country will require payment in something like Bitcoin, authorities said.
“There’s several Bitcoin ATMs in the county,” said Kruse. The scammer will ask that you “put $1,500 in this Bitcoin, get your receipt with your wallet number on it, take a picture of that wallet number and send it to me, and they’ll do it from there.”
Bitcoin is unregulated, and because the industry wants to remain unregulated, they are helpful when working with law enforcement investigations. But their help is not a guarantee of tracking down and returning any lost money, Kruse said.
Consider how the caller makes you feel, authorities said.
Scammers receive training to be successful and frequently manipulate the emotions of their intended victims. They can do this in several ways.
If they can keep up the sense of urgency in the person they are trying to scam, it makes it tougher for the victim to make good decisions. If they can keep their potential victim off guard, “they’re not thinking about how this is a scam,” said Kruse.
Scammers “will yell at them, not necessarily cuss, but try to keep that sense of urgency going to where they’re not focusing on what the real problem is,” he said.
They can also play on people’s fears. A common scam involves ‘the police’ calling to inform the potential victim that there is a warrant out for their arrest. This would be a shocking call for just about anyone, and the scammer is depending on the shock-factor to put their target on edge emotionally. The scammer will offer a way out for a payment over the phone, often in gift cards. They will say that failure to pay will lead to the person’s arrest.
“That’s not how we operate,” Patrick County Sheriff’s Lt. Steve Austin said. “If we’ve got a warrant for you, we’re going to come get you. We’re not going to call and tell you we’ve got a warrant and demand money.”
In another scam, scammers call parents or grandparents to inform them that a family member has been arrested and needs bail, once again requesting gift cards as payment.
“Even if your son calls you, or your grandson calls you in the middle of the night and says, ‘grandma, I’m in jail, can you send a $500 gift card,’ number one, law enforcement is not going to ask you to send a $500 gift card to bail somebody out,” said Kruse. “We have gotten four or five of those, usually in the summertime when the kids are out at the beach or something like that,”
The scammer plays on the family member’s emotion and desire to see their loved one released from jail to gain the payment.
Austin said it’s important to remember that “there’s only two people that will give you a dollar amount: Number one, is the magistrate that lets you know how much bond you need. Number two is the judge to let you know how much fine you’re going to pay.”
