Legal Juice
Even the best phone scams succeed just a fraction of the time, but that provides a good living for too many people. What about a scam that has virtually no chance of succeeding? Here’s just such a scam, as reported in The Brooklyn Paper’s Police Blotter:
90th Precinct – Southside–Williamsburg
A manipulative thief tried to get a woman to hand over a large sum of cash by telling her in a phone call to her Keap Street home on May 10 that they had kidnapped her son and were removing his fingers.
Even if you think it’s a scam, the caller now has your attention because you’re not sure.
The victim told police that she received the call in her apartment between S. Third and S. Fourth streets at 12:30 pm from a man who demanded that she send $1,000 to keep her son alive.
“We have your son,” the man on the phone said. “If you don’t give us $1,000, we are going to kill him.”
Someone else came on the phone and said that they were cutting the son’s fingers off and then another voice screamed.
Then they told the woman to go to Western Union branch and wire them the $1,000.
Now that’s enough to motivate any parent to take action. Of course, you always ask to talk to the victim, or for “proof of life” right? Or you can do what this woman did:
The victim instead called her son, who told her that he was at work and still had all his fingers.
Doh!