This morning, our office took a report of a possible scam to blackmail somebody into sending them money through a large chain store gift card or money transferring service.
Here’s how it works…
Somebody you do not know messages you via a social media account and you reply. That leads to them contacting you via “FaceTime” or some other facial recognition application, which they then take a screenshot of you if you accept their request. Please keep in mind that all they need is a split second to take a picture of your face for this scam.
Once they have an image of you, they can use it for all kinds of activities. In the call we took today, the person was asked via several text messages to send money or they would use their image in an inappropriate way and send photos to their family, friends and share it on social media.
After viewing the text messages, it appears that this is generating overseas and the grammatical errors were numerous in each message.
We just wanted to pass this on and hope that you share this with family and friends. It’s so important that we try to stay informed on the latest techniques to extort money away from hard-working people.
Catching these perpetrators is almost impossible. They use fake phone numbers, fake names, disposable phones, the list to try to avoid detection goes on and on.
Thank you,
KPD
This post was originally published on June 5, 2018 on Kenyon Police Department’s Facebook page.
