MBG-2021-02-0013
On February 1st, 2021, at approximately 4:46 pm, the victim contacted the police department advising they had been scammed out of $4000. They reported they were contacted by an individual who advised the victim their bank account had fraudulent activity on it. To keep the account from being closed the victim was advised they needed to purchase gift cards. The victim was to then provide the gift card numbers to the caller. The victim did not realize it was a scam until they had spent $4000 on the gift cards and provided the numbers to the caller. The victim later learned the caller was not from the bank the victim uses.
If anyone contacts you by phone or text message and claims to be from your banking institution or credit card, you should hang up and contact your bank and credit company with phone numbers you access on your own. At no point in time will a banking institution or credit card company have you purchase gift cards as a way to make any type of payments. This type of activity should be reported to the police department.