We received a call from Captain Mark Bowen, Badge 8004, Captain of Warrants for the Pima County Sheriff's Office. He informed us that we had two outstanding warrants for failure appear for federal jury duty. One warrant was for "Contempt of Court" the other was for "Failure To Appear."
We knew it was a scam. A county Sheriff is not going to enforce a federal warrant. And, most certainly, no peace officer is going to call us on the phone about this. No. Instead, if it were real, we'd receive a notice in the mail or perhaps a personal visit. Besides, we never received jury duty notice.
So, we decided to waste his time. We spent 15 minutes with him asking him to explain what was happening and what we needed to do. His explantations were deliberately confusing. What we needed to do was to go to the local police station and spend 8 hours being processed; or, for a mere $3, we could expedite the process and get the whole thing taken care of at the police station in no time. Of course, he wanted us to pay by credit card, including the CVV; and he wanted to put an "Ap" on our phone to trace our progress to the police station.
We asked so many questions that, at one point, he accused us of being stupid. "Did you have a stroke? Because you don't understand me," he said. And when that didn't work he yelled as us. We told him that that was not very nice. We told him we knew his boss, Sheriff Napier and that Mark would never want any of his people acting like this.
For some reason, rather than just giving up, Captain Bowen told me that we had made a mistake. We had misidentified ourselves at the beginning of the conversation. He wasn't looking for us. He was looking for someone else with the same last name.
"Why did you waste my time?" he asked.
Duh!
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This scam has been running for many years, recently in Cochise County. One search turned up this California incident. This scam has be written about by the FBI. We did report this incident to the Oro Valley Police.
