Area departments seeing similar ‘hostage’ scams

Wickliffe Police Department Lt. Pat Hengst is amazed at the length people will go to scam others out of money.

They’re one of the area departments that have had reports of a scam where callers tell victims a loved one is being held hostage and demand cash.

According to a May 1 police report, the department took a report of a woman who received a call that morning from an unknown number from a man with a foreign accent. He told the woman that her husband was in an accident and was being held by the caller’s brother at gunpoint. She asked who and where they were and to speak with her husband. The man only kept asking her if she would help him until he hung up.

Mayfield Heights and Lyndhurst police departments reported similar scams the day prior.

According to a Facebook post from Mayfield Heights police, a caller April 30 said she received a call from a man threatening to kill her husband over an accident that he was not involved in. Like the Wickliffe call, the man was speaking with a foreign accent. Though he cannot be sure, Hengst said it could be the same caller who spoke to the woman in Wickliffe, calling possibly from another country.

The woman said the man on the phone had told her that her husband hit his brother’s vehicle and was refusing to provide insurance information or pay for the damages and they had taken him hostage.

While on the phone with the person calling from a blocked number, she told them her husband emailed her, so she knew it was a scam didn’t provide any more information. She called the police just to make them aware of it in case the same scam happens to someone else.

Mayfield police wrote that they checked in with the Lyndhurst Police Department, where they learned a Hawken School teacher received a similar phone call stating her husband was being held hostage, demanding money.

Anyone who experiences similar calls should contact their local police department.