The lady in the jurors’ room was giving her spiels about the the stuff we needed to know, and telling her stories/jokes and stuff. Then she started going on about this jury duty scam that has been going around (harvesting the fruits of stupidity, I guess):
The scammers call and tell you that you failed to show up for jury duty and there is a warrant on your head, so to avoid arrest, you need to give them money. The person is directed to obtain a cash card in a specified amount, contact them and read the numbers off the card(s). The take from a single mark has inched up well into the four-digit range ($US).
So, yeah, I am going to give away money to an anonymous stranger over the phone. Right. My inclination, I think, would be to tell them to send an officer over to talk with me (apparently they are with the “County Police”, and there was one case where the caller could not even pronounce the name of the local city, which is pretty tricky).
So my question would be, would it be possible to obtain a fake, flagged cash card that would be like the blue dye bomb they put in money bags? A thing which when used would identify and scorch a scammer? Would that sort of thing be legal, would a bank or somesuch be able to make such a thing, and is it likely that they would be willing to?
It sounds ridiculous, but the people who pull this scam are pretty good at what they do, and can sound pretty damn convincing. Here is an interesting read:
Really? I got through the first 1/3 of that article and gave up in laughter. The woman who fell for that is monumentally gullible, despite what she claims. 9-1-1 caller i.d., lmao. Even my gullible dad who’s in his 80’s and clueless about how awful con artists can be wouldn’t have fallen for that.
Yes because the IRS sends the police to arrive in two hours and then calls to warn you that they’re coming. I believe that the dea is planning on using that tactic with drug busts.
Damn fine idea! I hope someone comes up with a way to make it work.
(We have to make sure of protections against false positives, i.e., if a completely legitimate fund-raiser calls to ask for donations, and the “tagged” account gets used.)
I’ve never actually been stung, but, oh boy, I get scam calls all the damn time, and I’d love to have a way to fight back. (I started a Pit thread… “Hello, I am calling from the Security for your Computer.” Grrr…)
Probably not. They’re taking cash out against the card, but the question is where? They’re probably printing up their own card & going to an ATM.
Even if they went to a place where they were interacting with a person (bank teller, check cashing place) there’s no mechanism in place (that I’m aware of) to 1. know exactly where the request came from instantaneously (to send the correct PD) & 2. Get a message to that employee to delay the transaction w/o making the ‘customer’ suspicious until the PD can arrive. That works in movies but not so much in real life.
The number of the card is the best possible thing to have to trace the transaction.
But it doesn’t do much good. There are layers and layers behind this. You want to first trace one, then the next, then the next. But right away you hit transactions taking place in other countries which makes things very complicated. All sorts of anonymizing tricks are used. Etc.
If you wanted to trace a million dollars, it’d be worth the effort but still difficult*. A few thousand? Total waste of resources.
*A bank in Bangladesh got ripped off for several million recently. So far, they think it might have ended up in North Korea. Maybe.
I have a friend who has some acquired brain damage from an incident a couple of decades ago. She has big signs taped up by her phone and at her front door reminding her DO NOT BUY ANYTHING. DO NOT GIVE ANYONE MONEY. So far they’ve worked. Perhaps some charitable group should print out a bunch of similar posters to hand out in shopping centers like candy to anyone who thinks they could do with one?
Of course, knowing that you need one is the first step in the battle…
Indeed. In fact, I was wondering if that level of panic was driven more by a guilty conscience than gullibility. If I knew I could only have made an honest mistake on my taxes, I doubt that I would do anything more than hang up and call the IRS to check this situation out. After all, it’s the IRS, not the Gestapo.
