This story originally appeared in The Centre County Gazette.
The phone rings, the number looks local and the voice on the other end sounds official enough. Maybe it shows up as the Centre County Sheriff’s Office. Maybe the caller uses the name of a judge you recognize from the news.
Then comes the punch: you supposedly missed jury duty or failed to update sex offender registration, and there is a warrant out for your arrest unless you pay immediately.
Sheriff Bryan Sampsel said that scenario is not hypothetical. It is happening in Centre County right now, and in some cases, it is costing residents thousands of dollars.
“It’s been going across the state,” Sampsel said in a recent interview with The Centre County Gazette. “Allegheny County had it. I think in Butler County had it last week. There’s different scams, and most of it is about juries, failure to show up for jury selection, things of that nature.”
In the latest round of calls, Sampsel said scammers are pretending to be deputies from his office, using spoofed phone numbers and real names they have scraped from public sources.
“They spoof our number a lot of the time and they make up an officer’s name,” he said. “Sometimes they get the officer’s name right and sometimes they do not. The local calls, a couple calls the last couple days have been someone that doesn’t even work here.”
In some cases, scammers are taking it a step further by sending fake documents that look like official court paperwork.
“This is a new one. This was a brand new one that I hadn’t seen before,” Sampsel said. “Failure to comply with sex offender registration requirements. They actually use a judge — Judge Honorable Casey McClain — as a judge. Clerk of Courts Jeremy Breon’s name’s mentioned in it. And it’s actually Sgt. Richard Hoover, which was our sergeant, but he is now not a sergeant anymore. But that’s a deputy’s name. They may actually look like an order of arrest. It may actually look like a real, real warrant.”
Behind the fake names and forged paperwork, the motive is simple.
“They want money,” Sampsel said. “I’ve had people lose $5,000 in these scams from what I’ve been told from people who call in [and] say I lost this amount of money. I said, ‘Call your local police department. Call the FBI.’ And sometimes you can’t get the money back.”
If a victim sends a check or authorizes a payment, there is only a small window to stop it.
“There’s a certain window,” he said. “If you send a check, there’s a certain window that they have. I believe it’s 48 hours to try to stop that check from being cashed. The window is very small.”
The callers are often outside the county and sometimes outside the country, using prepaid phones and bouncing calls through different numbers.
“All different states are chasing their tail on this,” Sampsel said. “They’re calling from different states, calling international phone calls. If they get one scam out of ten and they make a thousand or two thousand dollars in one day, that’s more than most people are making in month. It’s all money driven. They don’t want anything else.”
While anyone can be targeted, Sampsel said scammers frequently go after older residents.
“I would probably say it’s a majority of elderly citizens, senior citizens,” he said. “But I’ve had people from 35 to 40 get phone calls. Right now, it’s just a gamut of everybody. But they do target the seniors more.”
The payment demands are a major red flag. Sampsel said the scammers frequently ask for money through services and methods that no local law enforcement agency would ever use.
“They ask for like Apple Pay cards, Venmo pay, PayPal account,” he said. “We would never do that. We would send them to the courthouse to pay. We would never do that.”
For residents who have never received jury summons paperwork or had any interaction with the courts, Sampsel said the calls are almost certainly fraudulent.
“If you’ve never been arrested, you probably don’t have a warrant,” he said. “If you never received a jury summons, you probably [were] never summoned for jury duty. If you have none of these, if you’ve never had any interaction with law enforcement or the courts, they’re probably almost 100% false.”
Still, the scammers rely on fear to keep people on the phone and pressure them into paying quickly.
“They do threaten people sometimes, so that’s a big key,” Sampsel said. “Then the people get worried because they’re going to have to come and arrest them. So even if they threaten, you still have to have the courage to hang up the phone and call the police. They’re threatening with arrest, like they’re going to come right now and arrest you.”
Sampsel’s advice is simple and applies to every type of scam call, no matter what the caller claims.
“Hang up and call 911 and call your local police and report it,” he said. “Before you do anything else, make sure you hang up. Don’t give any information over the phone. Directly call your local police department and tell them what has happened. And don’t give them any incentive to call you back. Don’t call them back. Don’t provide any of your personal information over the phone. Don’t give them any account information. Don’t give out credit card information, bank account information, Social Security numbers, anything like that. Just tell them you’ll check into it, hang up the phone. And even if they threaten to come and arrest you, still hang up your phone and call the police.”
Locally, Sampsel’s office has tried to keep up by posting scam alerts on its Facebook page and talking about the issue on local radio.
“We try to get the information out,” he said. “It’s just hard to do. You know, they may call 40 or 50 people. They get one or two or three of them, and that’s not a lot of time for them, and it’s a lot of money people are losing. It’s cowardice. I wish we could find them and have them arrested.”
In Harrisburg, state lawmakers are also looking for ways to crack down. Senate Bill 992, sponsored by Sen. Michele Brooks of Mercer County, would update Pennsylvania’s Telemarketer Registration Act to cover not only calls, but also texts, voicemails and “ringless” voicemails, prohibit the use of artificial intelligence and fake caller IDs to defraud consumers and strengthen the state’s Do Not Call protections. The bill passed the Senate 50-0 in late October and is now before the House Consumer Protection, Technology and Utilities Committee.
For now, Sampsel said, the most powerful tool residents have is their own skepticism and a willingness to hang up and report the call to authorities.
