KENNIWICK, Wash.–A “quick-thinking” employee at a credit union here is being credited with helping to save a mother after she was targeted in a virtual kidnapping scam.
According Tri-Cities Credit Union, a “distraught” woman entered one of its branches and gave the teller a handwritten note, asking them to call her husband because their daughter had been kidnapped.
The Spanish-speaking fraudsters had earlier called the woman to tell her that they had kidnapped her daughter, the credit union said in a statement.
Tri-Cities CU said the scammers were able to track the location of her and her daughter’s phones and knew where they lived. The Tri City Herald reported that the scammers would not allow the woman to hang up, and told her that if she texted anyone they would know. They would also periodically hang up and call back from a different number.
Hearing Daughter’s ‘Voice’
“The fraudsters also let the woman hear what they claimed was the daughter’s voice to prove that she had been kidnapped,” Tri-CU President Doug Wadsworth said in the release, adding the scammers were likely either somebody else’s voice or an AI voice reconstruction.
The credit union said it believes the woman’s information got out after a family location sharing phone application named Life360 was hacked about two months ago. The woman is reportedly one of hundreds of thousands of people whose information had ended up in the hands of scam artists.
Sent Back for More Money
According to the report, the scam artists convinced the woman to send $1,000 to Mexico electronically before sending her into the credit union to get more money.
“Employees at the credit union immediately recognized this as the same kind of scam that had affected a Gesa Credit Union member a couple weeks earlier,” Tri Cities Credit Union said. “The employees began stalling while they called police. They also comforted the woman by telling her that it was a scam.
The credit union employees got the daughter’s phone number and started a video call to prove that she hadn’t been kidnapped. The daughter then drove to the credit union to meet her mother.
Once they were reunited, the mother hung up and disabled her phone location services.
‘Proud of Employees’
“Although this woman lost $1,000 initially prior to arriving, Tri-CU is proud of their employees for helping detect and prevent this scam from going any further,” Wadsworth said in the release.