Lodi Police Department warns community to be wary of email scams
In an effort to inform the public of how scammers attempt to recruit individuals into criminal activity, the Lodi Police Department is warning residents to be aware of email scams after one of their officers received one in his email Wednesday morning.
Victims receive an email notifying of a job opening and most of the duties and responsibilities associated with the job involve accepting, repacking and sending packages. According to police, this is a common scam where fraudulently purchased or stolen merchandise is shipped to the individuals home. The intent is for the individual to repackage the items and send them to the thieves, making it more difficult to identify the persons responsible for the fraud or theft and oftentimes originates overseas, according to police.
According to Lodi police officer Hettie Stillman, while the department hasn’t gotten a lot reports on this type of scam in Lodi, there several other scams common in this area.
“We do get a lot of reports from people that are getting scams in various ways whether that’s online or offline, and sometimes those could involve providing money, providing their personal information those are the types of common scams that we see,” Stillman said.
Stillman said that with this particular type of scam, the scammer is from out of the country and their writing is not translated correctly in the email.
“The moral of the story is, if you see something suspicious or if you’re emailed something suspicious and it doesn’t look right, don’t open it,” Stillman said. “If someone is asking you for personal information or for credit card information, if they are asking you to use Western Union or to send money — obviously those are things we would declare suspicious and advise you not to respond to or get involved with.”
She said it hard to combat the scams that are coming from overseas because they are not in the department’s jurisdiction.
“We typically investigate crimes that occur within the City of Lodi, so often times these crimes are undetectable because they’re coming from out of the country or hidden servers. Mostly likely if there is an investigation, the federal government handles a lot of those types of email phishing scams.”
Stillman said on the local level if someone has actually lost money in one these scams, the department will take a police report.
“The more important story here is to get people to not send money and not respond to these email phishing expeditions,” Stillman said. “It’s more important to have our public not respond to these, because after the fact, it’s really difficult to investigate.”