# Someone just tried to scam me
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [March 29, 2023, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859 "2023-03-29T22:03:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2023, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/1 "2023-03-29T22:03:48Z")
Phone rings. Hello. This is your grandson. My mistake was to guess which one. I should have asked which one. Anyway, he said, “How did you know?”, then went on to ask how I was and then started on a story about visiting Ottawa to attend a friend’s wedding and getting arrested for drunk driving on the way back to the hotel. But the judge was kind and if he paid the fine of $4300 by tomorrow morning, he would wipe out the criminal convection. But the judge also warned him not to tell anyone else. Of course he was telling me. So I was supposed to go to my bank and get out 43 hundreds, put them into a magazine and put the magazine into a letter-sized envelope addressed to an Ottawa lawyer and they would arrange to have it picked up by FedEx. In the meantime I was supposed to _immediately_ call this Ottawa lawyer–who happened to have a Montreal area code–for the details, like the address. Rather than doing that I googled the “Ottawa lawyer”. Well there was one of that name but he was a real-estate specialist. Meantime, my phone rang again and he identified himself as the Ottawa lawyer who wanted to know why I hadn’t called. He sounded suspiciously like my “grandson”. I told him I googled his name and there was no Ottawa lawyer by that name. He hung up immediately and I called my son asking if it was possible that his son was in Ottawa this week and told him the story. He said no and hoped I didn’t do anything. He added that curiously his daughter was in Seattle that week for a friend’s wedding. I’ve heard nothing more in the several hours since. I assume that once the scam is blown, they give up.
Did it come close to working? Not really. There were too many odd notes for a true melody.
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### Author:  [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2023, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/2 "2023-03-29T23:03:06Z")
The young (typically) relative needing bail money is an old scam. I didn’t know it was still being used.
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### Author:  [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2023, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/3 "2023-03-29T23:13:19Z")
“Hi Hari, this is your granddaughter. Hey, I got picked up by the Seattle police on the way back to my hotel and I need…”
(click)
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### Author:  [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2023, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/4 "2023-03-29T23:19:37Z")
A friend’s mother, who is quite intelligent otherwise, fell for this one.
Now, it helped that they had the grandson’s name, did a pretty good teenager voice… and picked a kid that’s been in trouble so often that granny’s reaction was “Sigh… what’s it this time? Oh, that’s better than last month…”
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### Author:  [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2023, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/5 "2023-03-29T23:22:40Z")
I personally know someone who fell for this twice! He blamed his son-in-law (father of the grandson) for reasons.
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### Author:  [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/6 "2023-03-30T01:41:23Z")
The Lil 'Wrekker has gotten this call before.
When she was a teenager.
She laughed in their face.
A second scammer called 10 minutes later “To see if she understood it was serious!”
She laughed again.
They hung up.
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### Author:  [@InternetLegend](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/InternetLegend)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/7 "2023-03-30T03:27:02Z")
The first time I heard of this scam, my own kids were in their early teens. I was pretty sure none of their grandparents would fall for it, but I warned all of them about it and reassured them that if either of my kids was in trouble, they knew they could call me or their dad and we’d get them out of it.
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### Author:  [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/8 "2023-03-30T09:30:24Z")
I got an email from myself [me@gmx.net] to myself at my real world name email address [me@earthlink.net] telling me that I was stranded in London England because I had gotten mugged and needed $1000 to replace my passport and plane ticket to get home.
Not working.
And I get phone calls for working on my college loans, however I left college back in 1984, and between selling my pair of horses, assorted savings, a small family trust and several grants and scholarships, I had no college loans and even if I had used a loan, it would have been long paid off.
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### Author:  [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/9 "2023-03-30T10:29:08Z")
> [@carrps](#):
>
> The young (typically) relative needing bail money is an old scam.
Too bad I haven’t gotten one of those yet.
[CRANKY OLD MAN VOICE] "It figures! I told that stupid son of a bitch to shape up, but did he listen to me? No! He can rot in jail for all I care!! [/ COMV]
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### Author:  [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/10 "2023-03-30T10:59:27Z")
IAA Canadian L who practices this kind of law, and legally speaking, there is so much wrong in the OP’s, well, OP. Nothing against the OP, mind, but the scammer got all kinds of things wrong.
A drunk driving charge will attract a fine upon conviction, but not $4300. Drunk driving fines start at $1000 for 0.08% over on a first offense, and while they increase the drunker the driver is, they’d have to get to the death level of alcohol poisoning for a $4300 fine. Unless it’s a third or more offense, in which case, we’re looking at jail time.
Then, the judge saying he’d wipe away the ordered criminal conviction if the $4300 was paid by tomorrow morning. After handing down a conviction, a judge cannot change his or her mind. An appeals court can change it, but a provincial court judge cannot, once the ruling has been made. There is no, “pay now and get out of it.”
Nextly, “the judge warning him not to tell anyone else.” All Canadian court rulings are a matter of public record, and open to the public and media reporters. If I wanted to know what happened in that courtroom that day, all I’d have to do is ask the court. And if the judge did indeed say that, which I highly doubt, then the judge should be debenched and disbarred.
It’s a scam, plain and simple. Don’t fall for it.
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### Author:  [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 11:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/11 "2023-03-30T11:12:22Z")
> [@Spoons](#):
>
> It’s a scam, plain and simple. Don’t fall for it. -
Of course it it. The whole idea is to induce panic in _one_ person. Even if you send out 1000s of emails, just one score a month sets you up for a huge income in the third world shitholes scammers usually live in.
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### Author:  [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/12 "2023-03-30T12:31:59Z")
This type of phone scam has evidently been going on for a long time. When I was a little kid, my mom got a phone call that freaked her out. She immediately made a call of her own and then was much calmer. I think I was home from school at the time, watching afternoon cartoons, mostly oblivious to what was going on.
After the second call she told me “someone just called me and said they had kidnapped your father. But I called him at work and he’s fine.” I presume a ransom demand was involved.
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### Author:  [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/13 "2023-03-30T13:25:18Z")
Coincidentally, I have The Today Show on in the background, and just now there was a segment about AI voice scams. Parents got a call supposedly from their adult daughter saying she was kidnapped. They went as far as withdrawing ransom money from their bank before they got in touch with their actual daughter who was fine.
The reporter on the segment then met with somebody who was an expert in AI voice cloning-- he input a few voice clips from other news segments she did, then they called a co-worker and asked the co-worker to do something for her in the reporter’s cloned voice. It wasn’t perfect, they said, there were some hesitations in speech and some segments of the cloned speech were more convincing than others, but it was good enough to fool the co-worker. And it sounded damn good to me. It had more real inflection and better pronunciation than typical ‘Siri’ style robot voices.
Scary stuff.
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### Author:  [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/14 "2023-03-30T13:51:50Z")
> [@digs](#):
>
> A friend’s mother, who is quite intelligent otherwise, fell for this one.
>
> Now, it helped that they had the grandson’s name, did a pretty good teenager voice… and picked a kid that’s been in trouble so often that granny’s reaction was “Sigh… what’s it this time? Oh, that’s better than last month…”
I wonder if they _really_ had the grandson’s name or she didn’t remember that she volunteered it without realizing. On the other hand, if they do a little bit of research on social media about their target, they could very easily learn the grandson’s name.
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### Author:  [@Fluffy\_PickleSniffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fluffy_PickleSniffer)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/15 "2023-03-30T13:53:41Z")
I’ve heard about that AI scam where they can imitate someone’s voice pretty well. I think I remember they said that it only takes about a 30 second clip of someone’s voice from a Youtube video, or TikTok, Facebook etc. to then clone it. That can be pretty convincing stuff. Scary.
Hari I’m glad you didn’t fall for your phone scam!
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### Author:  [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/16 "2023-03-30T13:56:27Z")
Yeah, but what’s the color of the boathouse at Hereford, where we spent many of our vacations? The name of Aunt Clara’s cat that you loved so much? The color of your car?
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### Author:  [@glee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glee)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/17 "2023-03-30T14:14:41Z")
I’ve mentioned before that a scammer called me and announced they were from Microsoft Support (presumably to tell me I had a computer problem and should pay them to fix it.)
I replied “Microsoft Support - how can I help you?”
Scammer “No, I’m Microsoft Support!”
Me “Microsoft Support - how can I help you?”
They rang off.
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### Author:  [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/18 "2023-03-30T14:37:51Z")
I would tell them I’ll bring them cash. I don’t want to go inside any courthouse or police building so if they can get someone to stand outside at the street corner I’ll be right over with the cash as soon as I stop by the bank.
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### Author:  [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/19 "2023-03-30T16:09:24Z")
My mom got one of these calls a few years ago. Her scam radar went off. When the fake “lawyer” called her, she calmly told him to please stay on the line for as long as possible so the trace could go through.
They hung up quickly.
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### Author:  [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2023, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/someone-just-tried-to-scam-me/981859/20 "2023-03-30T18:42:06Z")
I got an e-mail today, originating from a Best Buy in Orange, CA., that someone wants to put $436 in bitcoin into my PayPal account. I’m going to ignore it for now and see what happens.
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