Burn in Hell, Phone Scammers

My wife and I were at home one day this week when she noticed a voicemail recorded earlier in the day while her phone was turned off. She played the voicemail.

The caller said he was a sergeant in the sheriff’s department in the county where both of our sons live. He said that my wife was listed as the emergency contact for our younger son, and he asked that she return his call as soon as possible.

Of course, we responded with alarm – when the sheriff’s department calls and asks you to call back regarding your son, it’s hard to imagine that anything other than a car accident or an arrest (or both) could be the reason for such a call.

The phone number that the caller left in his message matched the number on my wife’s phone caller ID, and it had a western North Carolina area code, which would be correct. But my wife is clever, and instead of using the callback number, she instead looked up and called the direct line for the sheriff’s department in that county.

She explained to the person at the sheriff’s office that she was returning a call from a sergeant there and asked to speak to him. But there was no sergeant by that name in the office, nor was the number he left a number at the sheriff’s office, although perhaps it could be someone at the jail….

While she was having that conversation, I called our son, who it turns out was resting peacefully at home and who had no idea why anyone from the sheriff’s office would be calling us. He’d been home all day. Similarly, the sheriff’s office concluded that there was no legitimate reason we might have gotten a phone call allegedly from them.

My wife and I ended our respective phone conversations concurrently and called out to each other from adjacent rooms: “It’s a scam.”

I’m confident that if my wife had called the number the caller had given her, she’d have spoken with someone who told her that she needed to provide bail money, legal fees, or something like that to get our son out of trouble. This would be similar to a scam that was tried recently on a member of our extended family, who received a phone call from a guy who sounded like her grandson and who tearfully told her he’d been involved in an accident and had injured another driver, probably fatally, and who requested that his grandmother send him some money, but not to inform his mother because it would upset her too much. The grandmother disregarded the request and called the mother, the scheme quickly unraveled, and no money was transferred.

American culture has a long history of at least tolerating and sometimes even admiring Robin Hood-like endeavors that involve stealing from criminals and the rich/greedy. It’s trope that shows up often in television shows, with scammers getting charitable depictions in TV shows like The Rogues (yeah, you probably don’t remember that one – go look it up), Leverage, and Better Call Saul, and in movies such as The Sting, Paper Moon, and A Fish Called Wanda.

But in real life, I don’t think anyone has favorable opinions of scammers who prey upon people’s desire to help friends and family or to benefit those less fortunate, which is what most scams today seem to involve. Scammers like that deserve whatever negative consequences they get.

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