Couple gets swindled out of $7,500 in ‘grandparents scam’
DANBURY — Elaine and Joseph Lyons got an early morning call from who they thought was their 25-year-old grandson.
The caller said he was in jail after a car crash in Maryland with a woman who was 32-weeks pregnant.
He told the grandparents to call the lawyer whose name and number he provided. Worried, the couple spent the day on the phone with the socalled attorney, who claimed their grandson could face manslaughter charges if the woman lost her baby.
“It was very scary,” said Elaine, 79. “We would do anything to help our children or grandchildren.”
But the caller was not their grandson and the lawyer doesn’t appear to be a lawyer. The two Danbury residents are now out $7,500 after handing the sum in cash to a courier who came to their house for the bail money.
The two fell victim to what is known as the “grandparents scam,” where callers pretend to be a relative in need of help and money. Senior citizens are often the targets of these scams, according to the state attorney general’s office.
What happened to the Lyons was not an isolated incident.
“It seems to be pretty prevalent in Danbury lately,” said Frank Giannone, founder of Danbury Bail Bonds, who the Lyonses called after suspecting they had been scammed.
He said this is the second time in the last eight weeks that someone has called him after being scammed this way. The first time, he said, the Maryland victim was told a similar story about her relative being in a crash with a pregnant woman, and to wrap cash in a magazine and mail it to a Danbury address.
Giannone said he contacted Danbury police hoping they could catch the scammer at the address as the money was in route.
The department has caught scammers this way before, Danbury Police Det. Len LaBonia said. He said the grandparent scam is common and that police arrested someone involved about a month or two ago.
LaBonia said he has seen a dramatic increase in scams like this and others involving bank or credit card fraud since he started working in the department’s white collar crime unit in 2017.
“Those types of crimes have replaced a lot of street crimes,” said LaBonia, who has been an officer in Danbury for 24 years. “They are very lucrative. They are somewhat challenging to investigate.”
He attributes the increase to the internet and the difficulty police face in catching the culprits.
“These scams have gotten much more organized,” LaBonia said. “As a result, they’ve increased. They are hard to catch people. They are a challenge to us.”
Officers often faces jurisdictional obstacles when trying to investigate, but collaborate with other departments and have had success with a software he described as the “Facebook of financial crime investigation” to share information and catch suspects.