Making the phone scammers phone go dead

We recently talked about scams and how they can affect you if steps are not taken to verify who the person attempting to get money from you really is.

We recently had someone come to the Sheriff’s Office with money wanting to bond a family member out of jail, but the only problem is we could not find any record of that person in our jail and the “sergeant” the person was told to meet with has never worked for the Sheriff’s Office. The scammer that called this person to tell them that they needed to bond their family member out of jail had left a return number to call when they had the money. The next step would have been to have them send the money, so they could have the family member “released.”

If the money would have been sent to them, it would have been gone and we would have another victim in our community. Instead, this person came to the Sheriff’s Office to bond the family member out, and we were able to help them figure out it was a scam. We were also able to get the phone number of the “sergeant” of the jail who would be releasing the family member once they had paid the money. We have found in the past that many of these scams are performed by people not only around the country, but around the world, and can be very difficult to track down. We always forward the information to other agencies that help track scammers, but we have also found a very effective way of helping reduce the number people that may be scammed once we have located a phone number they are using.

This process is what I call the “bug them to death” method. We call them over and over and over and … well, you get the idea. We have found in the past that many people who contact us about a scam have been given the same phone number as the scammers attempt to reach many people at the same time. So, we begin the process of calling the scammers’ phone number with the plan to bug them so much that they disconnect the number. This, in turn, helps make sure that anyone who had already been contacted by the scammer will not be able to call them back on the number they had provided. We have had very good results and it proved to work very well once again.

With this recent incident, we called the person back and told him we did not appreciate them trying to scam our citizens. The man hung up on me once he realized I was not going to send him any money and that I was the Sheriff, rather than a victim. I called again, and he said a few choice words and told me I would never be able to trace his call. After that, one of our deputies called him and told him we did not need to trace his call, we just needed him to disconnect his phone number. He told us to “try and stop him” and hung up again. Over the next several hours we continued to call him. He eventually tried blocking the phone number we were using so we used another, and another. After many phone calls, he began to get mad and told us to stop calling him. We told him we would be happy to if he would provide us with his information, so we could complete our report. What this person found out as the day went on, is that there was only one of him and many of us. We took turns calling him to get his information until we placed a call and got the message we had been waiting for. “I’m sorry, the number you are calling has been disconnected and is no longer in service.” We called a few more times over the next several days to make sure the number did not get reconnected, but it has remained a “dead line” and no one else will be able to call that number and be scammed. We hope that these people can be tracked down and prosecuted as the states and feds work to track phone and online scammers, but until they are tracked down, we hope our efforts in keeping their phones ringing non-stop will keep a few more people from becoming victims.