Jury Duty Scam
- identity theft -

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following warning was sent to LA Community Policing by Patricia Villasenor of the LA City Human Relations Commission. Identity theft is a serious matter, affecting thousands of people. This is but one way criminals can acquire your sensitive information and gain access to your banking (and other) records.

This has been verified on Snopes.com (link listed below) and by the FBI (their link is also included below).

Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It's spreading fast, so be prepared should you get this call.

Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. Fall for it and your identity could be stolen, reports CBS.

In this con, someone phones you pretending to be a court official who threateningly says a warrant has been issued for your arrest because you didn't show up for jury duty. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant.

Sometimes they even ask for credit card numbers. Give out any of this information and bingo!  Your identity just got stolen.

This scam has been reported so far in 11 states, including California, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Colorado.

The scam is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving in formation by pretending they're with the court system.  The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Check it out here:

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel05/092805.htm