COLBERT COUNTY-The Colbert County Sheriff’s Office has issued an alert to the numerous Scams that are circulating in the area:
“I.R.S. will not call you saying you will be arrested
Any phone call or voice mail you get saying you will be arrested if you do not pay money is probably a scam and you should not return the call. If you are afraid you do owe money then you should contact the person or business you deal with directly and do NOT CALL THE NUMBER listed on the scam messages.
Scams are becoming a major problem that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Phone scams, mail scams, e-mail scams. We know this is stressful to citizens when they are contacted by these criminals trying to scam money and information. The best advise we can give is for everyone to spread the news to NOT TALK TO ANYONE YOU DONT KNOW on the phone or by mail.
We get this complaint about spam calls daily. Not a single day goes by without it happening to someone in our area. However, today seems to have been a record setting day. We received more than 20 phone calls today saying citizens had received scam calls from someone claiming to be the IRS. This is such a harassing thing for citizens to have to deal with, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it. These phone numbers you see on your caller I.D. are fake and most of the time will not even get anyone if you dial it. They can be computer generated numbers from a computer phone program that randomly picks numbers. Even so, if you did make contact with someone they are trying to illegally get your information or money.
Screening calls and ignoring out of area numbers is the best thing for you to do. We also ask that everyone please talk to your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers etc and make sure they are all aware of these type phone scams. Elderly and teenagers are two very vulnerable age groups who need to be reminded to not talk to anyone they do not know and to ignore all calls that show a strange area code. Please help us spread the word. This is something we’ve mentioned on Facebook every 2 or 3 months but you can never repeat it enough. Because we want everyone to be aware that these calls are definitely SCAM.”
