Phone scams are becoming more sophisticated.
Scams abound these days, and some scammers are fairly sophisticated in the approach they take to their marks. One of the most effective methods is making it seem that a loved one is in trouble, and money is required to bail them out. My wife Michelle and I almost fell for such a scam this past summer.
We were sitting at home on a Thursday morning about 10 a.m., just before the long Fourth of July weekend, when we got a call from what looked to be our adult daughter Andrea’s mobile phone number. My wife answered the phone, and she heard Andrea’s voice say, “Mom, I’ve been in a car accident, but I’m OK.”
Not the words you want to hear.
Since Michelle took the call, I’m going to let her describe what she experienced in her own words: “On Thursday, July 3, I was working from home and received a phone call on our home number that started with [the beginning of Andrea’s number]. I picked it up because I expected it to be Andrea, and it was Andrea’s voice saying that she was OK, but she had been in a car accident.
“Immediately, another person came on the line, said that they were an officer of the court and that Andrea had been in a car accident and was under arrest. She had been driving over the speed limit, was on her cell phone and rear-ended an individual. She was fine, but she was in a neck brace and they had confiscated her phone. He gave me a case number, 900D3195, and also his badge number, 4920. They said that Andrea had rear-ended a woman who was seven or eight months pregnant and was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance. They did not have a report on her condition, but said that Andrea had been assigned a court-appointed attorney by the name of Anthony Graves and that he would be giving me a call as soon as we were off the line. So we hung up.
“I then got a phone call from ‘Anthony Graves.’ He said that Andrea would be in jail over the weekend unless I was able to post bond, and asked if I could post a $15,000 bond via a bondsman. I said that, yes, I could. He said to call him back as soon as I had the funds, and they would make arrangements. So I scrambled to get some funds.
“I originally went to Bank of America thinking I could take a cash advance off of our credit card, but they claimed they didn’t keep that much cash in the bank! So then I went over to Wells Fargo, where we do most of our banking. The teller was amazing, asking me if I was OK, if I had any concerns, if I was being contacted by anybody that I had any concerns about, and so forth. She gave me examples of scams like ‘your grandson is in trouble.’ Obviously, she had been trained to watch out for scams when people withdraw a lot of cash. The ones that she came up with didn’t sound anything like this one, especially given that I believed the original call was directly from Andrea. So it wasn’t, you know, a third party asking for funds for somebody in the family. It was actually Andrea’s voice that was on the call.
“After I got the funds, I then called this number from Anthony Graves, and he said he would have somebody from the bond office come by and pick up the funds. And that’s when a red flag went up for me.
“I just told the gentleman, this ‘Anthony Graves’—whoever he was—that I was not going to let somebody just come to our home and pick up the money. And so he said, ‘Let me check and see what I can do.’ Then another voice—the original police officer?—came on the line and said, ‘Hold on a minute.’
“It was Andrea’s voice again, saying almost the exact same words as before: ‘Mom, I’m OK,’ to which I replied, ‘Andrea, what is your dog’s name?’ The line suddenly disconnected, and I never heard back from anybody else. I then proceeded to go back to Wells Fargo to thank them for looking out for me, and deposited the money back in our account.”
About this time my brain kicked into gear, and I just dialed Andrea’s “confiscated” phone. It just went to voicemail, which is normal, since she works as a therapist and can’t answer during a session. Fortunately, Andrea shares her location data with us via the iPhone’s Find My app. Lo and behold, it showed her phone was located at her work address in Healdsburg. Whew!
I’ll have more to say about our encounter with scammers, but it will have to wait until next month.
