KENNEWICK, Wash. – The Tri-CU Credit Union prevented a kidnapping scam on Thu., Aug. 8, the second reported case to hit the Tri-Cities in the last two weeks.
A press release from Tri-CU says a Hispanic woman requested a large amount of money from her account and gave a note to an employee to call her husband and inform him that their daughter had been kidnapped.
The woman had already electronically transferred $1,000 to the Spanish-speaking scammers, who had been tracking the location of the woman and her daughter through their phones. They would not let her hang up and claimed they could see what she was doing the entire time.
Employees at Tri-CU recognized the scam and called the police, comparing it to a Gesa Credit Union member who experienced a similar scam on Mon. July 29.
Employees then got a hold of the daughter’s phone number and video called her to assure her that it was a scam. The family was reunited and the woman was advised to change her account passwords.
NonStop Local spoke with Officer Ashley Marshall from the Kennewick Police Department who confirmed that kidnapping scams are generally targeted at Spanish-speaking families.
Tri-CU noted in its press release that the targeted members had the Life360 app on their phones, which recently experienced a data breach, though KPD cannot confirm if these recent scams were caused by it.
