By Mitchell Kaminski
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MOBERLY, Missouri (KMIZ) — On the morning of Nov. 18, Marlena Wisdom got a call from an unknown caller that nearly cost her a thousand dollars.
The caller ID said it was an unknown caller, prompting Wisdom to believe the call was coming from the police department.
“When I see that, I think of the police department, because usually when they call, that’s what it is. It comes up as an unknown caller,” Wisdom said. “So I answered it.”
When Wisdom answered the phone, a man on the line identified himself as an officer with the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department and told her she had failed to appear for federal jury duty. He said it was a high-profile case and claimed an officer had already gone to her home to serve a subpoena and that she had signed for it.
Wisdom denied ever signing for anything.
“I told him I had not signed for it. And he said, Well, you live at’, and he gave an address that I hadn’t lived at in 10 years,” Wisdom said. “I told him, ‘No, I don’t live there. I haven’t lived there for 10 years.’ And he goes, ‘Well, ma’am, we have a piece of paper here that you signed, and the officer served a summons to you, and you’ve signed it. So now we’re going to have to figure out what to do here, because he said you have two charges against you right now.’”
Wisdom said she had served on a county jury before, and something about the call felt off. But because she had never served on a federal jury and didn’t know how the process could differ, she became concerned.
“He told me that each one of them had a $2,500 fine, but I wouldn’t have to come up with $2,500 if he could get the judge on the line and the judge agreed to it, they would do a surety bond, which means I would pay $500 each on each account,” Wisdom said.
The man on the phone told her that he would need to come in for a signature analysis, but before he did, he needed to get her on the line with a federal judge so he could issue a surety bond. Wisdom was assured that with the surety bond in place, she would not be detained after she submitted a signature analysis.
“He was very professional, extremely professional. He spoke like an officer would, and he even at one point put a judge on the line,” Wisdom said. “I looked it up real quick while I had him on the phone, and he was literally a district judge, and so I thought I had a real, real district judge on the line.”
The judge had introduced himself as “Gary Fenner.” The real Gary Fenner currently serves in the Western District of Missouri. Wisdom explained the situation to the person on the phone and was told that a bond would be issued.
The man who identified himself as Fenner then put the officer back on the line. The officer told Wisdom that she needed to stay on the line and that if she was pulled over by police, to hand her phone over to the officer, and he would explain the situation. Wisdom told the man she wanted to let her coworkers at Moberly Area Community College know where she was going, but the man told her that, because there was a gag order, she could not talk about the trial case.
“He was like, ‘Now you need to go to your financial institution and get the money for this surety bond. Because if you show up and you haven’t paid the surety bond after the judge has said he’ll do it, then we can detain you and we may not release you until everything comes back from your signature analysis,’” Wisdom said. “The whole time he told me that I could not hang up because ‘I’ve had people hang up and then they just disappear on them.’ And he said, ‘If we’re wanting to clear this up today, I needed to stay on the phone’ so that he knew exactly where I was at.”
After grabbing her purse and keys from her office, the man told her that she would be reimbursed for her mileage drive, but he needed to go to a financial institution to withdraw funds for the bond. The man had also sent her emails with instructions on how to pay a FDIC-issued bond that looked official. The instructions said that she could pick between three FDIC money centers, Walmart, Walgreens and CVS, but she had to instruct the agent she was speaking with which “financial department” she would be using.
“I was panicking. I was literally panicking. I’m running around with $1,000 in my pocket and I’m panicking because I don’t know what was real,” Wisdom said. “What threw me off was the whole federal jury duty. You know, if it had been just regular court duty, I know that they wouldn’t do it that way.”
When Wisdom told the man she would be using Walgreens, she was given a barcode that she was told had a warrant number and was instructed to scan the barcode inside.
However, when Wisdom went into the Walgreens and said she needed to have two barcodes scanned to pay court fees, the lady at the counter looked confused.
“She looked at me very strangely, and I said, ‘You’ve never done this before?’ And she goes, ‘No.’ And he immediately, on the phone, said, ‘Ma’am, you need to head to your vehicle and go to the sheriff’s department. You have violated the gag order,’” Wisdom said.
While the man remained on speakerphone, the woman at the counter asked him for his badge number. Wisdom said he quickly rattled off a number, but the woman’s questioning made her realize the call was likely a scam.
“She said, ‘That’s not correct. That’s not how that works. Those are not real badge numbers.’ And I didn’t know what to believe. So I went ahead and left and went out to my truck and I told him, I said, ‘I’m just going to go to the Moberly Police Department.’ He goes, ‘OK, you go there.’ And so I headed that way,” Wisdom said.
On her way to the Moberly Police Department, Wisdom was told that she would be detained once she arrived and that the only way to fix it is if she went to CVS. When Wisdom told him that there wasn’t a CVS in Mobelry, he told her to go to Walmart. Wisdom told him that she would drive to Walmart but instead continued to the police station.
“I was in the lobby of the police department and I was waving through the glass that one of the officers to come to me and the officer comes around and he stepped out into the lobby and he goes, ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’ And the guy on the phone goes, ‘Where are you?’ And he gave it a few seconds, and then he clicked and hung up,” Wisdom said. “I got taken. I’m embarrassed to say that I almost lost $1,000.”
Joe Harrison, the chief deputy at the Moberly Police Department, said law enforcement frequently get reports about similar types of scams.
“One of the biggest things to show that it’s not legit is that we do not call people on the phone to inform them that they owe us money, that they have a warrant that they missed court or anything like that,” Harrison said. “That’s not the way that the business is handled. So, that’s the first sign of fraud.”
Harrison added for actual warrants or court-related issues, an officer will make contact with you in person or at your home.
“You would receive paperwork from the courts through the mail system or a deputy would serve in person those people, the paperwork, the official documentation from the court,” Harrison said. “We do not handle business over the phone at all for anything. So, if you receive a phone call from anyone claiming to be law enforcement, police department, sheriff’s department, any agency, what you should do is just kindly tell them that you’re going to contact the agency directly, hang up the phone.”
Worldwide, an estimated 608 million people each year fall victim to a scam. In 2024 alone, seniors lost $4.8 billion to scammers. Unfortunately, tracking down these types of scammers is a tall task.
“With today’s technology, people can use routers through computers and everything just like we see with the swatting type deals where someone will call in a false alert of something that’s significant, like a death or a bomb threat or something. And there’s no way to trace the call because it comes from a computer that bounces it all over the world,” Harrison said. “It’s unfortunate in today’s world that we have to deal with things like this with the technology and stuff that people have to try to scam people. It’s generally targeted at elderly people who don’t who aren’t aware. So like I said, the best thing for people to do is to just call your agency directly before you do any kind of access or any kind of business over the phone.”
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