just putting this out there because i’ve never seen this scam before. gave us a pretty intense 10 minutes of stress so hopefully this can help save someone that stress.
my boyfriend got a call from someone with a 206 number claiming to be a paramedic. the scammer said they were with someone who had my boyfriend listed as their emergency contact, and that they’d been in a bad accident (we could hear a woman screaming in the background or something). we assumed it was his mom since she was on the road for the holidays, and maybe they just couldn’t find her personal info on her for some reason. so we started freaking out and trying to get more info, find out where she was, etc.
the scammer then said they’d give us directions to where his mom was. we were getting ready to get in the car but this definitely raised red flags so i asked my boyfriend to get more information. he asked for his name and badge number, the location we’d be driving to, and who exactly the victim was.
at this point the scammer changed his story. he apologized, and said he wasn’t a real police officer or paramedic. he began threatening us, saying he had actually kidnapped my boyfriends mom for “getting in the way of a business deal,” and to not involve police or anyone else.
obviously this rang the rest of the alarm bells, so while my boyfriend was still on the phone just on the off chance this was real, i called his mom to get ahold of her. she was fine, and the scammer hung up after a few more threats.
i’m not sure whether the end goal was to get us to send money or to have us drive somewhere to be robbed, but i’m pretty sure it was one of the two. it all seems really obvious typing it out, but in the moment we were so worried for his mom that we weren’t thinking straight, which is what this strategy counts on.
if you ever get a call like this, now you know! has anyone else ever gotten this scam?
submitted by /u/cheetahprintcrocs
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