Jury Duty Scam Alert
This has been verified by the FBI. It is spreading quickly, so be prepared should you get this call. Most citizens take a summons for jury duty seriously. A new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your social security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this information, your identity was just stolen.
The fraud has been reported so far in Florida, New York, Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado, Oregon, California, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Hampshire. This scam is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system. The FBI and the Federal Court System have issued nationwide alerts on their websites, warning consumers about the fraud.
For more on this jury duty scam, along with other scams, visit the FTC's Identify Theft Site.