Jury Duty Scam
I got this email forward from a family member, and after checking out snopes.com to see if it was as urban legend or not, turns out its not. In fact snopes says: Real fraud, potential for financial harm unknown. As always, never give out your social security number, nor any other relevant information to anyone unless you called them, or you know who you’re dealing with.
Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough
people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam
has surfaced. Fall for it and your identity could be stolen, reports CBS
news.In this con, someone calls pretending to be a court official who
threateningly says a warrant has been issued for your arrest because you
didn’t show up for jury duty. The caller claims to be a jury
coordinator.If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the
scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he
or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant.
Sometimes they even ask for credit card numbers. Give out any of this
information and bingo! Your identity just got stolen.The scam has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma,
Illinois, and Colorado.This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation
over the phone to try and bully people into giving information by
pretending they’re with the court system.The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on
their websites, warning consumers about the fraud.