The most common that we see is jury duty scam calls. The callers claim to be from a local law enforcement officer and say that the person receiving the call has a warrant out for their arrest for missing jury duty.
Scammers are very smart, and they use emotions, panic, and fear to prey on their victims. They will use all available information along with the reactions of their potential victims to adjust their tactics to maximize the amount of money they are able to squeeze out of their victim and to have that money before the victim has time to second-guess if the scammer is legitimate or scamming them.
Unfortunately, the scammers sometimes even use spoofing to make it look like the calls are coming from legitimate numbers.
As a reminder:
- We do not have a GPS tether/tracking/house arrest program.
- You will NOT receive a call, text, or e-mail from us or one of our Deputies about jury duty, missing jury duty, or a warrant for your arrest in relation to jury duty. This is the most common scam attempt call reported to us.
- We will not require you to make any payments over the phone or to meet us anywhere to make a payment for any reason.
- We do not accept, and will not request, electronic payments such as apple pay, cashapp, venmo, zelle, or paypal for any payments.
- We do not accept, and will not request, gift cards, prepaid Visa cards, bitcoin, or yellow card for any payments.
- We will not argue or get angry if you say that you want to hang up and call the main line number to verify the caller and their information is correct. We encourage you to do that.
- Do not give or verify any information to the caller if you did not initiate the call, even if your caller ID shows the name/number of the business they claim to be calling from. Scammers can easily “spoof” a number to make it look like they’re calling from anywhere they want.
- If you ever receive a call, text, or e-mail from someone saying they work for us and want to double-check that it is real, please hang up and call our main line number, (334) 749-5651.
- Report attempted phone scams to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov
Report attempted phone scams to the FTC
Fraud reports help track scam patterns — file yours at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
