Police help nip scam in bud; resident gets $5,400 back

BELMONT — Quick work by local authorities prevented a local resident from being defrauded out of $5,400, police said.

A person identified only as “an older resident” received a phone call Wednesday from someone who claimed to be an attorney on Staten Island in New York City.

The caller said the local resident’s granddaughter had been in an accident and was in jail.

“The caller said the only way the resident could help the granddaughter was to send $5,400 immediately by UPS,” Belmont police Capt. Rich Mann said.

The resident was told to put the money in an envelope marked “legal papers.”

It was shortly after the envelope was dropped off at a UPS location in Tilton that the resident called police and told them what happened.

Within 1½ hours an officer was able to get UPS put a hold on the envelope and return it to the Tilton location where the resident was able to reclaim it, Mann explained.

“This incident just goes to show you how convincing these scam artists are, and how they play on people’s emotions,” Mann said. “They are very good at what they do, unfortunately.”

It was the second scam that police have been alerted to in recent days, Mann said.

He said another resident had been receiving calls on their home phone that caller ID shows as coming from the resident’s own number — a practice called caller ID spoofing.

When this resident does take the call, it is usually a foreign-accented caller telling them that the Microsoft software on their computer has been breached and they need an immediate patch to fix the defect or they will be hacked, Mann said.

“Instead of being a scam victim (the resident) will now be keeping a boat airhorn next to the phone that he will use to blast the scammer randomly till they hang up,” the department said in a post on its Facebook page.