COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KOAA) — A Central Springs woman reached out to News5 after receiving a concerning phone call from a man claiming to be with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Department of Justice. He told her she missed jury duty and had a warrant out for her arrest.
Jennifer Cecil discovered the man who called her was not a sergeant with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office because she went straight to the source.
“I thought, well, gosh, I'll just go on down to the sheriff's office. It's right here," Cecil said.
In the meantime, Cecil was still on the phone, and the caller kept transferring her up the so-called chain of command.
“He wanted me to go to my bank and pull out $15,000,” Cecil said.
Cecil also received a text message with a picture of a so-called arrest warrant. The warrants have some discrepancies.
“I’m just really meticulous with fonts and formatting in life and at work, and so I noticed that the fonts didn't all match up and it didn't look like a standard filled-in form,” Cecil said.
She tells News5 she also noticed the signature of the U.S. Marshal belongs to a man who serves in the western district of Pennsylvania.
She says the man on the phone also mispronounced Vermijo Avenue which was her final straw to go inside the sheriff's office.
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office calls it a jury duty warrant scam. The sheriff’s office says they were not the ones to make this call or any others that might be going around.
“Over the last several years my name's been used, recently the sheriff's name has been used in some of them. Most everybody in the office whose name is out there publicly, their name gets used in these scams,” Kurt Smith, the public informaton officer for the sheriff's office, said.
"It's not me," Smith said.
While this is not a new scam, the sheriff's office tells me they get calls about it every day.
“About a third of the phone calls we receive a day through our front desk or through different areas of the office is to confirm whether or not the person calling them was legitimate,” Smith said.
The sheriff's office posted about the scam last month on Facebook. They say they will never request money for any reason, and no law enforcement agency will call or text people to say they owe taxes, missed jury duty, or have a warrant out for someone's arrest.
“In all of these cases we want the public to reach out and ask and verify who they're talking to so we can cut down on these scams and we don't continually have this issue throughout our community,” Smith said.
They can, like Cecil, report this scam through the FCC.
Cecil is glad she did not fall for the trick and says others need to stay skeptical and vigilant when receiving calls that could be suspicious.
“Having the luxury of suspending my disbelief, I figured that the justice would prevail if I came inside that the sheriff's office would be a rational place of people who could explain it to me better in person than I was absorbing it over the phone if it was real,” Cecil said.
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