When a FedEx employee recently called the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office to report finding a package containing $20,000 being shipped to Illinois, Sheriff Eddie Hawkins’ first thought was that it may be connected to a drug deal.
But when investigators traced the package back to where it came from, Hawkins said they found a woman living in New Hope, who believed that the money was going to a boyfriend she had only ever met online. She had become the victim of a romance scam.
“When I went to talk to her, it took about an hour and a half of convincing her that this guy didn’t exist,” Hawkins told Rotary Club of Columbus members Tuesday at Lion Hills Center. “She believed that he was coming down here, that he was going to move in with her and take care of her the rest of her life. She had sent her nest egg to this guy. Every dime she had was in a FedEx box, going to meet this guy.”
The incident was one of many types of scams Hawkins’ department sees daily. He said they are an ever-evolving issue.
“Everyday people, all day long, are getting scammed out of their money,” Hawkins said. “People are taking and stealing their identity. We deal with it on a daily basis. Every day, it’s something new.”
While many scammers try to target victims online, Hawkins said, some of the more prevalent scams he and his department are seeing are still over the phone. Scammers may try to call and convince victims that they are someone else, even someone familiar or trusted, to get money from them.
Recently, he said, that has included acting like they are with LCSO. Scammers will call potential victims using a spoofed phone number to appear to be the sheriff’s office on Caller ID. Once the victim believes the scammer is with the sheriff’s office, Hawkins said, they may act like there is a warrant out for that person’s arrest, or give another reason that the person should send them money while staying on the phone.
“If we have a warrant for your arrest, we’re not going to call you on the phone,” Hawkins said. “We’ll show up to your house and we’ll politely ask you to take a ride with us and we’ll get it all straightened out. But we’re not going to call you on the phone and ask you to go down to the local (convenience store) and deposit money into a kiosk.”
Other scams
A similar scam came to his attention Monday, Hawkins said, but this time targeting those on the registered sex offenders list in the county. Scammers would go down the list, threatening that the offenders would receive further jail time if they did not send money immediately.
“Anyone can be a target for these scams,” Hawkins said.
Along with spoofing the LCSO number, Hawkins said scammers will also spoof the numbers of other entities that people typically trust, like their utility companies or cable companies. A good way to know if a call is legitimate, Hawkins said, is to hang up and call the entities’ official phone numbers, rather than staying on the incoming call. Otherwise, it may be difficult to tell if a call is legitimate or not just by looking at it.
“These bad guys are really good at what they do,” Hawkins said. “They’re professionals. They do this all day every day and they get better every time they make a call. They’re very convincing. And we have a lot of people that are good, honest, hardworking people, intelligent people, that fall for these scams. And we have a lot of people losing a lot of money.”
Other scams that were prevalent across the country last year, Hawkins said, included employment scams, cryptocurrency scams, celebrity imposter scams, lottery scams, home repair scams and tech support scams. Other schemes included IRS scams, Social Security scams and Amazon scams, where perpetrators pretend to be employees of each to victims’ personal information.
If someone believes they have been targeted by a scam, Hawkins said, hanging up and not giving out personal information over the phone is the first line of defense. After that, they should also notify law enforcement as quickly as possible, he said. Though, once money has been sent to a scammer, it can be difficult to impossible to get back, he said, as a lot of it goes overseas.
One woman in the county answered a call that appeared to be from Sparklight, her cable provider, Hawkins said. When the caller said her service would be cut off because of an issue with her payment, she provided her card information over the phone. But once she read out the card information, the scammer hung up abruptly.
Sensing something was wrong, she called Hawkins, who told her it was a scam.
“We called the credit card company five minutes later, and already she’d lost $700,” Hawkins said. “It’s that quick.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 30 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
