OAKLAND COUNTY, MI \u2014 Officials in Oakland County are warning residents to watch out for phone scams as they are investigating two new cases.<\/p>\n
The cases centered on two women in their 40s who were threatened with jail time because of a phony claim that they missed jury service.<\/p>\n
The caller told the women they needed to call the sheriff’s office to discuss a confidential legal matter, officials said.<\/p>\n
The women were then given real names of actual command staff members, who are employed by the Sheriff\u2019s Office but a phony number, officials said.<\/p>\n
The caller told them they would be arrested and jailed unless they made an immediate payment to a bitcoin machine, officials said.<\/p>\n
One woman was told to go to a location and deposited $1,000 to avoid jail time, officials said.<\/p>\n
Officials said she became suspicious when she was told she could not get a receipt for her payment. She then filed a complaint with the sheriff\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
The second victim returned the call but became suspicious and did not follow up with any payment. She also went on to file a complaint, officials said.<\/p>\n
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said his office will never call anyone and demand immediate payment for anything, including missed jury service, an unpaid ticket or to bond a loved one out of jail.<\/p>\n
He urged residents to hang up if they get such a call.<\/p>\n
“These scams and scammers have become more sophisticated and more creative, finding new ways to rob innocent citizens of their hard-earned money,” Bouchard said. “We continue to remind anyone who receives an unsolicited phone call from someone representing themselves as a government entity demanding immediate payment for anything that it is a scam. Don\u2019t believe it. Hang up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND COUNTY, MI \u2014 Officials in Oakland County are warning residents to watch out for phone scams as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-267913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}