News

Newest scam plays on heartstrings

By JESSICA SIEFF / Niles Daily Star
Monday, October 20, 2008 10:43 AM EDT

NILES - "He called on the phone. And he says, 'grandma...grandma, I'm in trouble..."

And when Niles lifelong resident Doris Kennedy heard that, her heart immediately focused on what she was being told her grandson, Andy, needed.

Kennedy received the phone call in July. When she answered the phone, she said her grandson explained to her that he'd been attending a music festival in Canada when he was involved in an accident.

According to a letter by Mrs. Kennedy, she was then told that the Canadian police were refusing to release her grandson until damages were paid in the amount of $3,900.

'Andy' asked his grandmother to money-gram the money to him and he would reimburse her when he returned home.

But it wasn't Andy.

Kennedy and her husband Tom would come to find out that they had been involved in a scam that she said the FBI told her at the time was one it had not yet heard of.

Someone posing as Kennedy's grandson convinced her to send the $3,900 - money she said she would most likely never see returned.

The man, "sounded exactly like our grandson," said Kennedy.

The man posing as Andy told Kennedy that he, "didn't want to call his dad until he could face him" but promised to pay the Kennedy's back as soon as he got back home.

A couple of weeks later, Kennedy said she phoned her grandson to ask when he would be reimbursing his grandparents.

"And he said, 'I was never in Canada,'" she said.

The Kennedy's were not the only victims in this particular scam, where a person or persons were impersonating grandchildren in order to have money sent to them.

The Saginaw News reported that "at least two mid-Michigan counties" were warning grandparents about the situation at the time.

Once Kennedy realized it was not her grandson - who lives in Saginaw - that she'd spoken to, she contacted Niles City and Michigan State Police - who quickly turned the case over to the Federal Bureau of Investigations for "jurisdictional reasons," said Niles City Police Department Capt. James Millin.

Millin said it is "very frequent" that the department receives complaints of various scams.

"Pretty much anytime somebody calls up...asking to cash a check ... it's a scam." Millin said some scams include scam artists telling a victim that they're trying to get money to a friend but are running into technical problems - so they send them a check and ask them to give their friend the money. By the time the money has been taken out of the account, Millin said, it's discovered the check is fraudulent and the money is lost.

Some checks will even go a step further, he said, because "it will have a legitimate company's name on the check."

There were signs of discrepancies in the phone call. Kennedy said that the man posing as her grandson told her he would pay her back after he flew home. So she assumed he must have been driving a friend's car -since he was supposedly in an automobile accident.

"In a foreign country, you know," she said. "You think - just pay it and get him home."

Still, she said, she had plenty of questions and asked for details about the supposed accident. "They had an answer for everything I asked," she said.

"It goes back to the old saying - if it sounds too good to be true, it is," he said. "People need to be cautious."

Print this story   |   Email this story