NEWS

Telephone Scams

Be careful of telephone scams. Here are two versions that have occurred in different cities:

A grandparent receives a frantic call from their grandchild, who claims to have gotten caught up in some trouble in Canada (for example, some hunting and fishing violations). The "grandchild" asks the grandparent to wire them money (between $200-$3,000) to help them pay the fines or post bail, and also asks the grandparent not to tell their parents.
The grandparent wires the money and discovers later that the person was not their grandchild, but a scammer.

Another version Coralville Police is aware of is when a Latino family receives a call from someone claiming that their brother/cousin/son in Mexico needs money due to some kind of emergency. They give instructions on where, how and to whom they need to wire the money. The family discovers the scam only after they send the money.

The Coralville Police Department asks residents to be very careful about requests from somebody to wire money, even if the person seems to be a family member. Do a little more checking and try to verify that the situation is what it's being presented as by the caller.

Also, calls that come "out of the blue" and involve requests for larger amounts of money to be wired somewhere should send up red flags. Be wary of requests to wire money that were not initiated by you.

For more information, click here.

The Coralville Police Department is now on Twitter! You can follow informational updates from the police department on www.twitter.com. You must create a free account in order to follow these updates. The police department screen name on Twitter is CoralvillePD.

According to Wikipedia, "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length."