The Ninth Judicial Circuit Court is warning citizens about a scam to extort money being perpetrated in its name.
In a press release, Presiding Circuit Judge Jeremy Taylor said his office recently learned that an individual received a phone call from someone claiming to be Michael Edmondson from the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department calling on his behalf.
“The caller claimed that someone had failed to appear either as a witness or as a party in a court case,” Taylor said. “The conversation was not allowed to continue far enough to reach an attempted extortion, but that assuredly was the purpose of the call.”
Judge Taylor said such a call “would never happen. If someone fails to appear for court, there is a procedure to handle that, but that procedure does not include calling a person on the phone and requesting money. Neither my office, nor a law enforcement officer, would ever call someone demanding money.”
Similar scams perpetrated in the past have instructed the person receiving the phone call to bring cash to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office to pay a fine for failing to appear or instructing them to purchase a pre-paid credit card such as a Green-Dot Card, then provide the card number to the caller.
“It does not work this way,” he said. “If a person owes fines to the court system, those fines are paid…
