Greg's Corner

Scam Round Up: Parking ticket scam and more

By Greg Collier

Today, we’re starting off the New Year with a handful of new scams.

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Now, the police impersonation scam is nothing new. This is when scammers pose as law enforcement and threaten a victim with arrest if they don’t pay a made up fine. However, a new variation of that scam has turned up in an East Texas city.

Residents of Navasota, Texas, have received emails that try to imitate the city’s Chief of Police. The emails are coming from a Gmail account, which should be a tip off the emails are part of a scam. The strange part of this scam is the emails are asking residents to become collection agents for the city.

While the news report doesn’t go into great detail about the scam, we imagine that the typical police impersonation scammer is looking for money mules to do their dirty work. It seems the scammers are looking for unwitting participants in their scam to collect the phony fines from victims.

Always be wary of unsolicited job offers. With any job offer, if an email comes from a Gmail address rather than a business address, there’s a pretty good chance the offer is a scam.

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In a small Indiana county, residents have been receiving phone calls telling victims they’ve won a prize from the Mega Millions lottery. Victims are being told they’ve won money and a truck from the nationwide lottery. It’s with the truck where the scam begins. Victims are being told they need to purchase a $500 gift card to pay the driver who is bringing the truck. Since the victim may think they’ve won a large sum of money, $500 isn’t much to pay to get a new truck. This is the advance fee scam. It is illegal to make a lottery winner pay for their prize outside of the initial ticket purchase and subsequent taxes. That’s not even taking into account that most lotteries do not give out trucks as prizes.

According to the Mega Millions website, no representative of Mega Millions would ever call, text, or e-mail anyone about winning a prize.

If someone is asking you to pay for a prize you supposedly won, the chances are there is no prize.

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Lastly, if you receive a parking ticket on your car, make sure it’s from the city before making any kind of payment. In Scottsdale, Arizona, residents there have been finding parking tickets on their cars. The ticket states that you can pay the fine by scanning the QR code on the ticket. After scanning the code, victims are taken to a payment website that no doubt puts the money in to the scammers’ pockets.

According to Scottsdale police, the fake tickets do not contain what parking law has been supposedly broken. Nor do the tickets have any kind of citation number.

This is becoming an issue around the country as these parking ticket scams have been popping up all over, including a recent arrest in Santa Cruz, California.

If you receive a parking ticket with a QR code on it, call the city to verify whether the ticket is bogus or not.