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A sophisticated scam by phone, which has been around for some time, has hit scores of people in Memphis and Shelby County recently. It is a particularly bad example of fraudulent criminality because the caller often knows something about the person he is calling, and the suggestion is made that some family member is in trouble with the law.
A typical call came to a Memphis woman whose daughter has been in and out of mental health facilities and sometimes homeless. The caller identified himself as a lieutenant with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, said that the woman’s daughter had been arrested, put on diversion and was being placed in a halfway house. But, he said, the family needed to make a payment of $875 right away for a monitoring bracelet. He suggested she use a Cash app.
Suspicious, the woman said she would talk to her family and asked for a return number. She then called CrimeStoppers to ask if families are supposed to pay for the ankle bracelets.
They are not. And no one should ever provide any kind of payment of that kind. The truth is no law enforcement agency nor any government agency will ever ask for a payment on the phone. Never use a payment app and never give out a credit card number to phone callers.
The woman gave us the number left behind. We called the number and got a voice message that sounded very real. The scammers even are known to look up retired and deceased officers to use their names.
That’s the thing about these scams, according to a spokesperson with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. They seem real and so they sometimes work. She said another person that morning had gotten a call about paying $900 over the phone to get her son out of jail.
“They are very realistic calls,” she said. “That’s why a lot of people are scared when they get the call, and some do make payments,” she said. “These scammers spend time researching people so they know what to say. They especially prey on the elderly.”
We left a message on that call-back number. Five minutes later a person sounding like the one in the voice message called us from a Florida telephone number. When he heard why we were calling he promptly hung up the phone. The phone numbers were passed on to the Sheriff’s Office but no doubt the scammer already had moved on to other numbers.
Guns and intimate partner
violence behind cases
solved by tipsters in April
Guns, mostly automatics. Bullets flying in shoot-outs. And domestic violence.
These were the main themes underlying half of the 16 cases solved with the help of tips to CrimeStoppers in April.
In one incident that started with a verbal altercation and ended in an exchange of gunfire and one victim dead outside a store on South Bellevue, police later counted 52 spent shell casings on the concrete. One suspect was charged but was a fugitive until someone called CrimeStoppers and provided his location.
Another shooting left a man dead from multiple gunshot wounds. A tipster called CrimeStoppers and gave the shooter's street name as Chicken Wing.” That helped police identify Okorie Thomas, AKA Chicken Wing, as the prime suspect. He was arrested and charged with second degree murder afew hours later. The tipster was awarded $4,000.
Even more guns are involved in the unsolved cases being investigated by police last month.
Two murders cases were closed last month thanks to tips. That makes nine for the year sofar.
Know something? Call 528-CASH. Don't have information but would like to help CrimeStoppers?
Go to www.crimestopmem.org and click on the donate button.
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