LAKE COUNTY, Fla. — Brenda Crowe’s mom had not been home alone long when she had to make a frantic 911 call to keep someone from taking her, telling her mom during that call, “It’s a fraud, he would have taken you mom. He would have taken you and we wouldn’t even have known where you were.”
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Earlier this month, Christine Rutherford was surfing around on her iPad, looking for a recipe on how to make vinegar water. There was nothing unusual about what she was doing, but the message she got on her device was.
She told WFTV, “What happened was the phone rang and I looked at it and it said it was Georgia. He said that my iPad had been locked up. He said he had to call Apple to get permission to get it unlocked.”
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Channel 9 asked, “Did he want your bank account information?” She said, “Well, as we talked on, he said, oh yeah, he said that I had been hacked, and he said someone okayed them to take $10,000 out of my account.”
She said the phone call went on for about two hours stating the man on the other line told her money was for online gambling on the dark web and when it didn’t seem like it was working, the scammers took it a step further.
“And then he said, no, I need to go down there and take my money out of the bank. I said, I don’t drive, and I can’t go to the bank. Well, he said he could call Uber and looked out the window there and I saw that car sitting out there.”
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But she didn’t make it to the car because by chance, or luck or something else, her son in law came home.
The 911 dispatcher explaining to the woman that this is not normal for the bank, telling her, “Yeah ma’am they don’t normally show up at your house to do something like that if they’re legitimate.”
But it sure seemed like they were to the 86-year-old woman.
Other seniors across the U.S. have reported that imposters have offered to send cars, like an Uber to take people to the bank.
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The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said they are not investigating, that this call was classified as a suspicious person call and the deputy could not locate the driver of that car and that is where it ends.
Fraud and imposter scams. like this one appear to be the most reported scam with many of the victims, like seniors, being too trusting.
The highest number of complaints come from California and right here in Florida.
The FBI estimates that senior citizens lose more than $3 billion each year to financial scams including romance and lottery scams.
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