The police arrested several scammers who posed as police officers on the phone and robbed their victims of a lot of money.
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Shock calls: Police catch phone scammers
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Telephone fraud and shock calls are a danger that older people in particular are confronted with. The Bavarian police have now succeeded in arresting telephone scammers. This is reported by the police headquarters in Swabia North.
That’s how the scam worked
In January 2022, call center scammers called a couple from the Augsburg district. The scammers posed as police officers and described a fictitious break-in in the neighborhood. As a result, the money of the person called is at risk, the scammers claimed. Therefore, a colleague would come by and take the money to safety temporarily. The couple actually fell for this nasty scam and gave their cash to the wrong police officer.
Incidentally, phone numbers that appear to be quite credible can be displayed for such calls. We explain how this is possible in the article Call-ID spoofing: How to protect yourself from fraudulent calls.
police strike
The Augsburg criminal police investigated and finally arrested three suspects in mid-March 2022. Two of the three suspects are currently in custody. The investigators also managed to identify those behind this and other crimes, and the police arrested another three men aged between 20 and 30 in Lower Saxony. They are also in custody.
The scam described above is just one variant. Another version of the shock call is that the caller claims that, for example, the child has committed a serious accident and the parents called should therefore immediately hand over money for the bail. We feature these and other scams in these reports:
