GREENSBORO, N.C. — State and Triad law enforcement agencies have been dealing with scam calls for years now, but nowadays they say it's on the rise and most likely only going to get worse.
Over the past two weeks, three Triad law enforcement agencies posted messages on their social media sites all warning that scammers are pretending to be law enforcement officers. They do so by claiming the person on the other end of the phone missed court or jury duty and to avoid arrest they must pay.
Davidson County Sheriff Richie Simmons said a deputy will never call and ask for money, but that's the tactic they use, they pray on people's fear.
He said they make claims and say you can fix it by paying some money. Sometimes it's hundreds of dollars other times it's thousands.
Sheriff Simmons says he's seen a lot of these cases where scammers reach out through multiple platforms and make different claims, it even happened to him.
"You've got to resist wanting to react in two seconds, take a few minutes, investigate it, make a few calls, just like I called my bank just to make sure that it wasn't them and it gave me peace of mind and in a couple of minutes I had my answer," said Simmons.
Sgt. Angelo Johnson with the Guilford County Sheriff's Office said the scammers are posing with the names of actual law enforcement officers and even using artificial intelligence to make their voices sound familiar.
"The more people who say no to it, the more people they're going to find different and better ways like this AI technology that's very new and there's going to be other ways as well, to combat it, like I said, if it doesn't sound right, if it doesn't look right, feel right, smell right, hang up give us a call don't give out in any personal information at all," said Johnson.
Simmons said most of the time the people making the calls are from other countries sometimes people can get their money back, but most of the time they don't.
To keep from becoming a victim, at first doubt hang up and if you think it could be true call the organization's official number to double check.