A Pastor and Lawyer Almost Got Taken for “Missing Jury Duty”
Within 24 hours, both Monica Peters – family law lawyer and FUMC Plano member – and I went far down the road to giving money in what sounded like very credible phone calls. A county “Sheriff Department” official alerted us that we had missed our jury summons and were in contempt of court. We both consider ourselves fairly astute to such scams but were reasonably convinced that that these calls were authentic when they were not. While I was on the call, I checked to see if the name and rank given to me over the phone was on the Denton County’s Sheriff Department’s website. It was there. Even though we both finally saw the contradictions in the story presented and terminated the call before we had given any money, we were both shaken by the realism of the details and our capacity to be drawn in by the ruse.
I called the Denton County Sheriff’s Department immediately to report that someone was impersonating one of their officers. I spoke to the actual sergeant there, and he informed me that there had been a real uptick in these calls in the last two weeks. They had traced the activity as originating they think, from a prison in Florida and that there was little they could do. Therefore, since these kind of scams have hurt people in our congregation before, I decided to write this. Here are a few important reminders.
A jury summons will always be mailed to your home and a summons to appear in court will be given to you in person at your home or business. If you receive a summons over the phone for jury duty or any other kind of summons, hang up.
The county, state and federal government (e.g. IRS or FTC) will NEVER ask you for money over the phone or use PayPal, Venmo, etc. to collect any money. If someone does, hang up. The scammer is playing on your fear.
If anyone calls, even from a number that looks legitimate, demanding you comply with the payment of money immediately, hang up.
If anyone says you MUST stay on the phone and not call or tell anyone else about the business at hand, hang up.
If anyone calls requesting you to prepay fees or taxes in order to receive a lottery prize that you have supposedly won, hang up.
If anyone calls posing to represent a legitimate company or utility, demanding immediate payment to make things “right” on your account, hang up.
If “tech support” calls or emails claiming you have malware in your system and requests payment to fix the defects or access your computer, hang up.
If anyone calls promising something too good to be true and asking for payment to cover the expenses, hang up; it IS too good to be true.
And finally,
If anyone says by phone or email that they are your pastor asking you for gift cards and to keep this discrete, hang up and block that sender; he is not your pastor!
Unfortunately, these are only a few of the amazingly realistic-sounding ploys that thieves use to play on our fears and prey on our wallets. Let’s frustrate them.
With you in the cause for good,
