Most Recent Jury Phone Scam Alert
Archive
- (August 2013) If you are contacted by a person, via phone, indicating that you missed a scheduled court appearance; and they instruct you to pay a $400.00 fine or risk having a warrant issued for your arrest, please do not give that person any information or money. Please advise the Jury Office at (202) 354-3352.
The caller claims to be court staff. They will request you pay a $400.00 fine or risk having a warrant issued for your arrest. The caller will ask that you take care of the $400.00 fine immediately by going to a Wal-Mart or CVS to purchase a “money pack” – a type of prepaid credit card and to call a specific phone number and read off the number on the money pack card for the payment to be made and the fine to be settled.
The fraud has been reported in multiple courts around the country and so far one federal court in New Mexico.
The FBI & the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.
http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JuryService/JurorScams.aspx.
- If you are contacted by a person claiming to be calling from our jury office (with caller ID showing a courthouse number) requesting that you pay a fine because you missed jury duty, please do not give that person any information. Then, please advise our Jury Office at (202) 354-3362.
- 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 DUTY 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, Arizona and more. 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 & the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.