Police live-tweet investigation into potential scam
An elderly couple walked into the Burlington Police Department on Saturday with a suspicious postcard they got in the mail. It asked them to pay $12.95 in shipping costs for a $325 necklace they hadn’t ordered.
A lot of times when a suspected scam is brought to the attention of the department, if no one has fallen victim to it, it often ends up not being pursued because of lack of resources, police said.
But this time Lt. Glen Mills decided to do some digging.
“We log something like 30,000 calls per year — so it’s easy to say, ‘Well no one was the victim of the crime, so why should we even spend any time on it?’’’ Mills said. “Then I said, ‘You know what? I think I should look into this because it is odd, and what if these crimes are going out and what if there are seniors out there that actually giving their credit card numbers and being frauded?’’’
He began making phone calls and looking online, trying to find out what the company was and where they were located. During one call, a call center employee threatened to call the police on him.
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“It was just very, very odd,’’ he said. “And it kept getting more and more odd and suspicious.’’
Mills chronicled his investigation in real time on the department’s Twitter account, using the hashtag “#notificationwarehouse.’’ He said it occurred to him that maybe other people — the public, other law enforcement, or media — heard of the same possible scam and could help him, similar to crowdsourcing.
“We have this fraud problem nationwide and our seniors are being hit quite a bit,’’ he said of live tweeting his research into the company. “And maybe if we got the information out real time on some of these scams and frauds, maybe we could lower the number of victims, make the public aware of them pretty quickly.’’
Eventually, he tracked down the owner and real name of the business — Products for Life, registered in Nevada. After looking a little into the owner, Mills said he thinks he should continue his investigation.
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“It’s very time consuming,’’ Mills said of investigating scams. “It took a lot of time just to track down the real owner of a real company, which should have been a simple thing.’’
The department has looked into scams before, but they often lead to dead ends.
In June last year, Mills tried another approach to dealing with scammers claiming to be IRS collection officers.
With his latest try dealing with a potential scam, Mills said he got a few people messaging him on Twitter, including postal inspectors in Washington, as he tried to track down the source of the company and some of the information that came in was helpful.
“I think a lot of citizens were happy to see that we were looking into this and not just blowing it off,’’ he said.
Check out the whole investigation:
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