Deputies with the Harford County Sheriff’s Office stopped $40,000 in cash from being mailed to scammers after the victim advised police that sending the package “didn’t seem right,” the department said.
According to a police news release on Saturday, the woman received a phone call informing her that there was fraudulent activity on her bank account. The scammers posed as representatives from her bank and told her to mail $40,000 in cash as part of a “fraud investigation,” police said.
Under the impression that the money would be wired back to her as indicated by the scammers, the 78-year-old woman, of Street, mailed the $40,000 to a Florida address and contacted police soon after, the sheriff’s office said.
Police said that after the sender reported what she had done, deputies went to a local parcel shipment store. Body camera footage from Wednesday shows them recovering the package. All $40,000 was accounted for, police said.
According to police, an investigation into the source of the scam found that the phone number used to place the scam call had been disconnected and that the Florida address had been vacant for months.
In a separate case last month, the Harford County Sheriff’s Office arrested two men by coordinating a meet-up between alleged scammers and an 87-year-old Bel Air resident whom they are accused of previously scamming.
That alleged scam dated back to June 18, when the victim received a pop-up message on her computer, falsely claiming that her device had been hacked. According to police, the message listed a phone number and instructed the woman to call for assistance.
The two Chinese nationals living in New York then allegedly instructed the victim to withdraw a substantial amount of cash, place it into a package and hand-deliver it to an individual using a prearranged code word, according to police.
Both men were placed under arrest during a second meet-up with the victim and face felony charges of theft between $1,500 and $25,000 and theft scheme of $1,500 to $25,000, along with two misdemeanor counts of the same charges. They posted $5,000 cash bonds June 20.
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