DANBURY — It’s repeated by a person of authority in just about every article written about scams. And this one is no different:
“If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is,” says Stokes County Sheriff Joey Lemons.
Scams have been around forever, but it seems like criminals are more clever. Or more brazen. Technology like smart phones, the internet, even cryptocurrency have only made things easier for the scammers, who seek to separate you from your money or personal information.
That’s one thing about the law enforcement profession,” said Lemons, “the criminal element is always looking for ways that they can be smarter and get ahead of the game. We have to do the same thing; we have to make sure we’re keeping up with the trends of what’s happening so we can protect our public.”
Incident reports from the Sheriff’s Department are full of investigations into fraud reports.
“If you think you’ve been the victim of a scam the first thing to do is to contact our office, report it as a crime, and we’ll have a deputy come out and speak with you and determine whether or not a crime has taken place. If no personal information has been exchanged, more than likely a crime hasn’t occurred. But we will still file the report to see if we have similar phone calls. Most of the scams we get derive from phone calls. We all get calls from numbers we don’t recognize, and…
