Wednesday morning, I received a call from someone claiming to be my granddaughter. She was crying and sobbing and told me she had been out with her girlfriends the previous night. The police had pulled the girls over for speeding and during the stop the cops found marijuana under the back seat and they were arrested.
She then transferred me to “officer Derrick Johnson.” He told me that it was common procedure to keep the arrest from being put on her record by going to a store like CVS and buying four iTunes cards valued at $500 each. These would be redeemed after her court appearance at 4 p.m. that day. “Officer Johnson” said that he would call me back in an hour to see if I purchased the cards.
In the meantime, I called the Lakeport Police Department and they advised me not to give any money or personal information as it was a known scam. When “officer Johnson” called me back, he asked if I had purchased the iTunes cards and I lied to him and told him yes. I asked to meet him at the jail or the court house. He said that wasn’t the way things were done. He told me to scratch off the silver line on the back of the card and read the numbers to him. I refused, and I tried to keep him on the phone hoping that the police would be able to trace the call later. I then contacted Lakeport police and they told me my efforts were to no avail as the call was from a burner phone and was untraceable.
I’m writing this article in hopes of preventing this scam being played out again on other unsuspecting grandparents.
