Shutesbury Police Department - Phone Scam Warning

During the week of October 19th, 2009 the Shutesbury Police Department iinvestigated an attempted phone scam. The call was
made to a senior citizen of Shutesbury and prayed on her sympathy towards a son who reportedly had been arrested in Canada.
The caller stated he was the son of the senior citizen and needed $4500. The money would be used to release her son from jail.
The caller sounded like her son had enough information to initially convince her to help the caller. The money had to be in cash
and needed to be brought to a Wal-Mart where it was to be sent to another Wal-Mart in Canada.

Thankfully the senior citizen had the presence of mind to follow-up on the call before sending the money. There are similar scams
as well being used around the country. Below is a synopsis of ways some scam artists work.

The basic set-up is that a scammer gleans just enough information about a family (e.g., names, ages, addresses, phone numbers)
to be able to impersonate one of them during a brief phone call to another family member. The scammer will place a call and claim
to be in some form of distress (e.g., a victim of legal problems, theft, or fouled-up travel arrangements) that has left him stranded
far from home and in desperate need of someone to wire him some cash. In many cases eager-to-help relatives will promptly send
money as instructed, not realizing until it's too late that the person they've been talking to is an impersonator and not a genuine
family member. (Grandparents are particularly common targets of this scam: They may be easily fooled by an impersonator because
they often have only sporadic contact with their grown grandchildren and therefore may not be very familiar with a particular grandchild's
adult voice and may not have current information about the grandchild's whereabouts or activities that might give away the impersonation.)

If you should receive such a call and can't be sure whether it's on the level, the best approach is to elicit as much information as possible
from the caller, then contact a direct relative (e.g., a parent, sibling, or child) of the person the caller is claiming to be and try to verify
the information. (For example: "I just received a call from someone who identified himself as your brother, Bill, and he said his wallet was
stolen in Calgary and he desperately needs some money to get back home. Do you know if Bill is traveling in Canada right now?")

Another approach to use if you can't reach other relatives right away is the one employed in the example quoted above: Ask the caller
a question that an impersonator would be unable to answer. Be careful to pose a question that requires more than knowledge of basic
family information (e.g., names, birthdates, addresses), because that information is too easy for outsiders to look up - instead, ask
about something like a detail of a family event that someone who was not present would be extremely unlikely to know about.

If you receive similar or any suspicious calls, don't hesisitate to call your local Police Department to report it.

Listed below is a documented scam found on the website http://www.snopes.com. Additional information passed on has been collected
from this same website.

Someone reporting to be our grandson called us today to say he had been picked up on a dui in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and
needed $5,100 to make bail. He said to send a Money Gram via Wal-Mart. When we asked for a specific address, he gave one in,
Toronto Ont Canada. I asked him a question only our grandson would know the answer to and the caller couldn't answer correctly.

He called back about 10 minutes later, my husband said "Who the hell are you?" and the caller hung up. Our grandson goes to
college in Tucson and we live in California so it took us a while to catch on to this scam. (My husband initially was getting ready
to go to Wal-Mart before I caught up with him. What if I hadn't been home?) I reported this incident to the consumer fraud hotline.

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