Published: Friday, March 29, 2013 12:12 AM CDT

Area residents are being warned of a scam that solicits money to help out a family member in need.

Yankton Police Chief Brian Paulsen said this is a variation of one of the more common scams out there.

“Most of the scams that have been reported have required a certain amount of money to be wired somewhere,” he said. “A lot of scams come down to parents, grandparents and other family members knowing where their kids and grandkids are.”

Paulsen said Yankton residents have recently been called by someone claiming to be their child. In a majority of these cases, the scammers have not received their money because the family members knew where their child was at the time the call was received.

“People just need to be extremely cautious,” he said. “Anytime someone is asking for money to be wired, (there) should be an immediate red flag that goes up. People should think this just doesn’t seem right.”

Nancy Saunders, laboratory coordinator at Mount Marty College, said she had a number of students say their family members have been called by the scam artists.

“This has happened twice to kids I know,” she said. “Someone called an elderly person in their family and said this is their grandson, and they’ve been in a car accident and need money immediately to get transported for help.”

The scammers asked for $2,000 to be wired to a certain number. In both cases, the caller would talk in a muffled voice that was very hard to       distinguish.

In another case, one of Saunders’ soccer players, who was in high school at the time, had this happened to his grandmother.

“The scammers called his grandmother and said he was out of the country and needed money wired immediately in order to get back into the United States,” she said. “In both situations, the money never got wired over. One of the ladies said her bank wouldn’t allow her to do it because it was a scam; in the other situation, Western Union said this number is incorrect and this is a scam.”

Paulsen said there are a number of scams floating around.

“It’s tough to nail down a lot of the specific scams out there because there are so many of them, but this one with the bond money is a big one,” he said. “It’s probably happening every day, but a lot of times it’s not getting reported. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done besides document the case.”

Paulsen added that it’s difficult to do much about the scams because, in most cases, victims are being called from phone numbers that cannot be tracked. In addition, the numbers to which the money is to be wired are also impossible to track.

“If people get a call, they need to call the police and let us know that it’s going on and it happened to them,” he said. “This is a good one to let the public know about because it’s happening a lot in the area.”

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