WESTFIELD – Even persons who know better can be victim of scammers who are experts at playing on the emotions of their victims and making their common sense temporarily disappear.
A city woman was panicked Wednesday by a caller who told her a tale which sent her to empty her back account so she could ransom her husband – without calling her husband at work to ensure that he was really in peril.
City police were notified when a bank employee called police to report that a woman had given another customer a note asking that police be called because her husband had been kidnapped.
According to police, the woman then emptied her account, despite warnings by the bank teller that she was responding to a scam, and took $1,300 to a supermarket to make a wire transfer to the putative kidnapper.
Officer Matthew Schultze found the woman attempting to make the money transfer and found that she was still on the phone with the kidnapper.
Police eventually learned that the caller, ‘Victor’ had said that her husband had been involved in an accident with him but ‘Victor’, who said he has been eluding police for five years, told her that he had stabbed her husband because he had attempted to call police.
The man agreed to take the woman’s husband to Noble Hospital, but only after she sent him $1,500.
While Schultze was speaking with the victim, Det. Roxanne Bradley went to the woman’s home where she spoke with her young adult daughter.
Bradley reports that the younger woman also panicked but she was able to call him at work.
Bradley found a language barrier when she spoke with the man who was cautious and not completely cooperative until his daughter got on the phone and convinced him that Bradley was a police officer.
She also called the man’s supervisor to ensure that he was actually physically present at his workplace and was not speaking under duress from some other location.
Once the man was convinced to speak freely, Bradley reports, he excitedly said that he and his wife had recently seen and discussed earlier reports of a similar scam.
Because the woman was still on her phone with ‘Victor” her husband had difficulty reaching his wife who was still focused on paying the money to get him help and was not paying attention to what Schultze and others were telling her – that she was speaking with a scammer.
The woman, eventually convinced that her husband was safe, gave an officer her phone and he spoke with “Victor” briefly. The number the man appeared to have been calling from was found to be 535-9579, a Holyoke number which has been involved in several similar scams.
Then, Bradley reports, the woman’s daughter mentioned that her brother has the same name as her father.
Confident that the boy was not really in danger, Bradley said “You never know” and officers nonetheless spoke with the school resource officer at his school who said that the boy had been in school and was probably then walking home.
Bradley and the boy’s sister intercepted him on Broad Street and ascertained that he was in no danger.
Ironically, at about the same time a student from Westfield Vocational-Technical High School came to the station because he too had been told that a loved one had been involved in an accident and he had to send the caller $1,000.
Police found no evidence of an accident that could have involved the youth’s loved one and no money was sent.
