An Athens woman was recently lured into a scam that is designed to manipulate a person’s fear that a family member is in immediate trouble.
The scam, sometimes called the grandparent scam because it targets an older member of a family, has been perpetrated for years in Georgia and other states.
This scam occurred on Jan. 16, when the 72-year-old woman received a telephone call from a person she believed was her daughter, according to the report filed with Athens-Clarke police.
The daughter’s problem: She was in a wreck and is now in jail, but a lawyer would be calling to help arrange her release.
The woman told the officer that upon speaking to the alleged lawyer, she was told to withdraw $12,000 cash and give it to a woman who would arrive at her home in an east Athens subdivision. Sure enough, a woman in a red sedan arrived and collected the cash.
But more problems arose.
The victim said the lawyer called back, saying he needed $12,000 more. Sometime after this call, a man in a white Ford Escape arrived and collected the additional cash.
It was only after she gave away the $24,000 in cash that she called her out-of-state daughter, only to learn she had not been in a wreck, nor had she been in jail, police said.
The woman also went as far as to contact the Asheville (North Carolina) Police Department and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, and both confirmed they had no history of her daughter, the report shows.
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