INDIANAPOLIS, IN (WRTV) — INDIANAPOLIS — $9 thousand in cash bail is what set off alarm bells for one Indianapolis family. One member of that family is speaking out with a warning of a potential bail scam in the Indianapolis area.
WRTV spoke with a woman who said last week a person called pretending to be her brother and said he was involved in an auto accident downtown. Within minutes, the family said a person claiming to be a lawyer also called the family, originally demanding forty-five thousand dollars cash bail, then saying it was reduced to nine-thousand dollars.
The family did end up getting in touch with the son who is out of state at college and determined this was fake. They reported it to the Attorney General's Office.
While the President and CEO of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) serving Central Indiana, Tim Maniscalo, said he has not heard of this specific scam in the area, he was not surprised, and to him, it certainly sounds similar to "grandparent scams."
"The scammers seem to be getting more sophisticated and more ingenious almost every day. They never seem to run out of ways to kind of trick you. It kind of seems to be like a little game of what I call whack-a-mole. You seem to get them over here and then they pop up over here,” Maniscalo said.
The BBB suggested also reporting anything suspicious to the scam tracker on its website. https://www.bbb.org/local-bbb/bbb-serving-central-indiana
WRTV also reached out to the Attorney General's Office multiple times for comment, but have yet to hear back.
