Scammers are scary good. Be careful!

The call came in on our home landline, which we rarely use.

            My husband told me the message was serious, so I played it back. A police officer said there was an important civil case that involved me. It was urgent that I call back.

            When I called back from the car, he introduced himself as Sgt. Robert Henderson from Cuyahoga County Civil Court Division. He sounded calm and almost bored that he had to call me, but the news shook me up.

            Apparently, I was supposed to appear in civil court in February and never showed up, so the judge issued two warrants: a failure to appear and a contempt of court. What?!

            I never received any such mailing, I told him.

            Well, somebody signed for it, he said, because it was certified mail. Only two people live here and neither one of us received any such mail.

            I had no known civil case and had just finished serving jury duty. There’s no way I wouldn’t appear if I had known, I told him. I just did jury duty. I’m a good citizen.

            He told me I had two choices: turn myself in now and possibly be held for 48 hours or post bail.

            This makes no sense, I told him. He told me the warrants were already issued and if I didn’t deal with this now and got pulled over for a traffic violation, an officer could arrest me on the two warrants.

            When he offered to send me the documents, I gave him my email address. Right away, he sent three court documents with a magistrate’s signature saying I had indeed failed to appear. As a journalist since 1986, I’ve seen truckloads of court documents and these looked totally legit, including the court logo, fonts, style and layout.

            He said if I posted bail, I’d get it back once the hearing was over. How much is bail? I asked. He sent three more documents.

            A whopping $12,600.

            What?!

            When I told him I needed to call an attorney before I did anything, he said I wasn’t to hang up and break the call line I had established with him until this got resolved. He said it would have to be a cash bail.

            Red flag.

            It was a Friday afternoon at 2:30. The bank wasn’t open much longer. He told me I’d better hurry.

Another red flag.

Then he started to tell me how I would pay the bail. “We have kiosks at convenient stores…” Wait a minute. This sounded like a joke.

Nope. It was a total scam!

            By that time, I had arrived at my daughter’s house. She assured me it was a scam. Just mute it, put him on hold and don’t get back to him, she said. For two hours he couldn’t try to scam anyone else. He finally hung up.

When I called my friend, Sheryl Harris, who is Director of the Cuyahoga County Department of Consumer Affairs, she put my mind at ease. Total scam, she confirmed.  It happens all the time, she said, so often, that she has information about it on their website to protect consumers.

Go to consumeraffairs.cuyahogacounty.us and under the words Scam Squad and click to read about the variety of scams. These creeps are creative. There are fake job scams, student loan scams, bitcoin scams, utility shutoff scams, sweepstakes scams, foreign lottery scams, fake debt collector scams, health scare scams, arrest and jury duty scams and grandparenting scams.

  Please share the information with all your family members, especially older folks who are often targeted by phone and mail. You can also call 216-443-7035 for help.

It’s tempting to stay silent out of shame or fear and tell no one you were scammed or nearly scammed. For a few days, I still had niggling fear that I was in big trouble.

We need to spread the word to stop scammers from preying on people. Two of my siblings had scammers on their computers trying to trick them into giving away debit card information. My husband had a friend buy $2,000 worth of gift cards, allegedly for him. The bogus email saying he needed them was from scammers. She bought the gift cards and emailed back the numbers on them. The scammers got all her money, even though the cashier at the drug store warned her that buying that many gift cards might be a scam.

            The scammers didn’t get my money, but they did steal my peace of mind.

            Don’t let them get yours.