Scammers impersonating police or court officers are calling and threatening people with arrest unless they pay thousands of dollars in fines for missing jury duty or for other reasons, with a sharp increase in such calls locally occurring during the past month, the Juneau Police Department announced Friday.
The callers “spoof” real phone numbers from JPD or other agencies such as the Anchorage Federal Court system, and often use the names of real officers, according to an information release by Deputy Police Chief Krag Campbell.
“From there, the scammers begin to claim that the person receiving the call has an arrest warrant due to missing a grand jury hearing, or some other similar activity,” the release notes. “Callers may be threatened with going to jail or being detained if they don’t pay the fines.”
“The scammers can be very convincing and demanding as they want to try and convince people they are legitimate. They will often tell the victims that there is a ‘Gag’ order in place that prevents the victims from discussing details of the call with anyone, including family members, and even authorities; otherwise, they would get into additional trouble. The scammers may even send victims copies of fraudulent warrants in an attempt to convince them of their legitimacy.”
Among the reminders in the release are JPD will never ask a person to send money to pay for a warrant, and “paying fines and fees with Bitcoin, and money cards is not a legitimate means of doing business.”
What it’s like to get a scam call
One such call was received about a month ago by Danelle Beck, a state employee who in an interview Friday said the caller tried to scam her into making a $3,000 online payment to cover a bail bond so she wouldn’t be arrested for missing a jury summons. She said she initially feared the call was legitimate because she recently rescheduled such a notice — and her caller ID showed the main JPD number of (907) 586-0600 — but in retrospect there were red flags that could have tipped her off before she ultimately concluded she was being scammed.
For starters, Beck said, the caller initially called her by her maiden name. Also, the call came during the early evening, after normal administrative business hours, and the caller’s heavy southern accent suggested he might not be a local official.
The caller was “very polite, very proper” at the start of the call as he identified himself as a JPD officer and told Beck about “an unfortunate incident we need to discuss,” she said.
“It was a Thursday evening and he had said that I had missed that Monday’s jury service,” Beck said. Furthermore, according to the caller, “they had sent us specific paperwork, basically a packet of discovery. And that was what was the big issue — not so much that I had missed just the court date — but I had this legal information and that somebody had signed for this discovery information on my behalf.”
The caller told Beck a warrant had been issued for her arrest, and that to avoid that happening she could either bring the supposedly missing paperwork to the police department or pay to cover a bail bond. The payment would either be $1,000 cash in-person at the station or $3,000 online.
That was when Beck started having doubts, since among other things the $3,000 payment was supposedly a 10% bond on a total supposed bail of $30,000.
“Why would I have a $30,000 bail for a missed court appearance?” she said. And that’s when I was like ‘I’m feeling really weird about this.’”
Further suspicion was aroused when Beck’s husband offered to go to the police station to verify whether the signature on the paperwork was hers, at which point the caller changed the address he would supposedly need to go to and continued pressing Beck to make an online payment.
“(My husband’s) like ‘One thing you could do is you have the officer’s name. Just hang up and call him back,’” she said. “And I was like ‘You’re right. I should do that.’”
After hanging up to call JPD, Beck said she got called again repeatedly — including from two or three unknown numbers — but declined to answer.
What to do if a call appears to be a scam
“Hang up the phone” is the first and most succinct advice provided by Campbell.
“If you think it could be a legitimate call, tell the caller that you will contact them on their published business line,” he added. “Then hang up and call them back. DO NOT just use the same number that they called you on. That will just call them back. This is because if it is a spoofed number, it will show up differently on your phone, than what is dialed. Find the public phone number for the organization you want to call and verify it, then manually enter that number into your phone to make the call.”
Callers will often try to get people to send payments using services such as Zelle, Apple Pay, PayPal, Western Union transfers, gift/money cards and Bitcoin.
“One twist the scammers may try is to tell the victims to go to the police department after they have provided the money receipts to the scammers and show the numbers to the police department to verify everything is correct,” Campbell wrote. “This is done to again try and convince the victim of the legitimacy of the call. But, the scammers know that once they have the money receipts, they can pick up that money from almost anywhere in the world. Often even routing the money through various services to prevent tracing it.”
Some people have been scammed out of several thousand dollars, according to Erann Kalwara, a JPD spokesperson. During a two-day period in mid-July, for instance, one person was scammed out of $10,000 (with two payments of $5,000 each) and another scammed out of $4,550.
“The victims (were) withdrawing large sums of cash from their financial institutions and depositing the funds using the coin machine at a local store,” she wrote in an email. “The scammers are persistent and one stayed on the phone with the victim as she made the transactions, providing instructions.”
She said incidents where fraudulent transfers of funds occur can be reported at the JPD website at juneau.org/police. All incidents — attempts as well as successful frauds — can be reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
