The FBI is warning of a jury duty scam, and the warning is being emailed around the United States, as the fraud continues. Police in Colorado Springs, for example, have emailed the following warning to Colorado residents:
“Here is a new scam that is out and about.
This has been verified by the FBI (their link is also included below). Please pass this on. It is spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take those summonses for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced.
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. Give out any of this
information and bingo; your identity was just stolen.
The fraud has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma, Illinois , and Colorado . This (swindle) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system. The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.”
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Explains the FBI, “The phone rings, you pick it up, and the caller identifies himself as an officer of the court. He says you failed to report for jury duty and that a warrant is out for your arrest. You say you never received a notice. To clear it up, the caller says he’ll need some information for “verification purposes”-your birth date, social security number, maybe even a credit card number.”
Evil!
“This is when you should hang up the phone. It’s a scam,” adds the FBI website.
You can read more about the jury duty scam at the FBI website. The original notice is from 2006, but police report a recent surge in the scam, so it’s alive and well.
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