A quick-thinking employee at a Tri-City credit union saved a mother after she was targeted in a virtual kidnapping scam.
The distraught woman came into the Tri-City Credit Union on 19th Avenue Thursday and gave the teller a handwritten note, asking them to call her husband because their daughter had been kidnapped.
The Spanish-speaking fraudsters called the woman Thursday to tell her that they had kidnapped her daughter.
The scammers were able to track the location of her and her daughter’s phones and knew where they lived, according to a press release from Tri-CU Credit Union.
They wouldn’t let her hang up, and told her that if she texted anyone they would know. They would periodically hang up and call back from a different number.
“The fraudsters also let the woman hear what they claimed was the daughter’s voice to prove that she had been kidnapped (which was likely either somebody else’s voice, or an AI voice reconstruction,)” Tri-CU President Doug Wadsworth said in the release.
It appears the woman’s information got out after a family location sharing phone application named Life360 was hacked about two months ago. She was one hundreds of thousands of people whose information had ended up in the hands of scam artists.
“It seems likely this is how the fraudsters were able to track the location of these victims in real time, and knew their personal information,” Wadsworth said.
The scam artists convinced her to send $1,000 to Mexico electronically before sending her into the Kennewick credit union to get more money.
Employees at the credit union immediately recognized this as the same kind of scam that had affected a Gesa Credit Union member a couple weeks earlier.
The employees began stalling while they called police. They also comforted the woman by telling her that it was a scam.
The credit union employees got the daughter’s phone number and started a video call to prove that she hadn’t been kidnapped.
She then drove to the credit union to meet her mother.
Once they were reunited, the mother hung up and disabled her phone location services.
“Although this woman lost $1,000 initially prior to arriving, Tri-CU is proud of their employees for helping detect and prevent this scam from going any further!” Wadsworth said in the release.
This is the second mom to be a target of the same scam. The last one targeted a woman in Pasco, where police officials said it was a known scam had targeted a lot of people, some who lost thousands.
It seemed the scammers are targeting Spanish-speaking people who may have recently immigrated to the United States, Wadsworth said in the release. The scammers seem to prey on victims who may not be comfortable speaking English, may not recognize financial scams or be familiar with the financial system. They’re also not comfortable calling police.
The FBI shared some ways to spot a virtual kidnapping scam:
- The calls don’t come from the kidnapped person’s phone.
- The callers go to great lengths to keep their target on the phone.
- The scam artist are usually not able to answer simple questions about the person they claim to have kidnapped, such as what they look like.
- The ransom money is only accepted through a wire service.
