The Lancaster County Sheriff\u2019s Office is investigating a fraud that resulted in a woman losing over $11,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Chief Deputy Ben Houchin, a 68-year-old woman from southeast Lancaster County reported receiving a call from a man claiming to be with the Drug Enforcement Administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The man convinced her that she was a primary suspect in a cocaine investigation in Texas and could face up to seven years in prison. He told her that if she paid a certain amount, she would receive a new Social Security number, and the matter would be resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The victim withdrew $11,800 from her checking account and was instructed to deposit the money into a bitcoin ATM using a QR code provided by the man, which allowed him to access the funds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the transaction, the man ceased all communication. The email address he provided ended in \u201cdea.gov.gmail.com,\u201d which Houchin noted is not a valid government email address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scam is still under investigation, but Houchin emphasized that once money is sent in such scams, it is very challenging to recover it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Lancaster County Sheriff\u2019s Office is investigating a fraud that resulted in a woman losing over $11,000. According to Chief Deputy Ben Houchin, a 68-year-old woman from southeast Lancaster County reported receiving a call from a man claiming to be with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The man convinced her that she was a primary suspect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,13],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-3740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awareness","category-phone-scam","tag-scam-awareness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3742,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740\/revisions\/3742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ripandscam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}