Hey so fun new scam just dropped! I got a call earlier today from someone spoofing the local police department's desk number, asking me if there was a reason I'd missed my jury summons this morning.
Friends, I had not received a jury summons for this month. Which I told him, at which point his previously clear diction suddenly turned into a rapid mumble, only becoming clear for scary words like 'federal' and then asking to confirm my address, at which point I hung up and decided to call the police department later.
When I called the police department the desk officer sounded so tired y'all. All I had to say was "Hey I got a call earlier saying I missed jury duty this morning?" and she immediately sighed and told me that yes it was a scam that was going around and thanked me for calling to confirm.
So this is your periodic reminder that law enforcement agencies will not call you to tell you that you're in trouble. If you need to pay a fine of some sort they will mail you a physical invoice. Anyone calling you saying they're from the police or any other law enforcement organization (up to the CIA and yes I have heard of scammers attempting to impersonate CIA agents over the phone) who then tries to get financial information from you over the phone is a scammer.
I know I actually bang on about this a weird amount, but it is my fervent hope that the information will stick in peoples' brains if they get randomly selected for the adrenaline spike lottery. Scammers use scary words to get you to panic in order to shut down your critical thinking, and if even one person's brain spits out "Tumblr user waterhobbit said the cops/CIA/federal marshalls don't call about this shit" before their bank account routing number is in the hands of assholes I will consider it a job well done.
The person in this post follows my rule of thumb that protects me from 99.9% of all phone scams, and i'd like to highlight it here
For ANY "important" call you actually think might be real, get the name of the agency or institution involved, (and here is the important part:) look up the phone number to that agency or institution on your own, and call back about it.
If you never use a phone number they give you and always look up the number on your own, they can never scam you. Here's how it looks.
"hi, i'm from your bank and your account has just been charged, just, so much money, we're worried it might be fraud."
"Thank you for letting me know, I'll call back later, goodbye"
Then i look up my bank's phone number, and call that number, and tell them i received a call about suspicious activity on my account.
If it's real, they'll help me with it, and if it's not they'll confirm it's not true. Either way, i know i'm talking to the actual bank and not a scammer.
This works for ALL phone scammers, no matter how scary or time sensitive they try to tell you it is. If it's real, something like "i'm driving right now but i'll call back in a few minutes, no thank you i already have the contact information for your agency/business" is ALWAYS an acceptable answer, at most they will want to give you some kind of a case number before you hang up. The more they resist you calling them back from a number you look up, the more likely they are to be a scam.
It's important that YOU call the number of the agency/business. Don't let them "call you back from the main number", it's possible to spoof caller IDs including government numbers.
and don't use google search results, go to the actual agency website
