BY BRETT HAWKINS and NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writers
Long Beach resident Rosemary Ashley received a phone call a few weeks ago from a young voice that said, “Hi, Grandma. Do you know who this is?” The grandmother of 13 was stumped but wagered a guess. “Is this Taylor?”
The young man replied that he was indeed Taylor and then went on to relate a tale of woe to her.
He explained that he had gone to Toronto, Canada with a friend. He claimed they had rented a car and got into an accident, resulting in an arrest for driving under the influence. Then he pleaded with his grandmother to send $4,000 to him so he could be released from jail.
The shocked grandmother was skeptical but willing to send the money if the story proved to be true. She knew Taylor, an underage student at San Diego State University, as a very conscientious and dependable student, and this was the first time Rosemary had heard of any such behavior.
The con artist begged Ashley to not tell any family members about his trouble with the law, and he told her that the Canadian equivalent of a public defender would call her soon to give her instructions on how to transfer the money.
Finally realizing the call was too outlandish to be true, Ashley told the con artist she would wait for the attorney’s call and follow the instructions given to her. But actually, she was gathering information that she hoped would enable the Long Beach Police Department to arrest the scammers.
A man claiming to be her grandson’s defense attorney called a few minutes later instructing her to make a money transfer at a local liquor store.
Ashley then called the LBPD to report the incident, but she was told there was nothing the police could do. Family members and friends were incensed. To them it seemed the police were passing up an easy opportunity to nab criminals who were targeting the elderly.
LBPD Sergeant Dina Zapalski said she understood the frustration felt by Ashley’s family and friends, but there was nothing a local law enforcement agency could do. ” The crime occurred in Canada so we could not investigate it,” she explained. “We took the report for Canada and sent it to them. That’s the problem with a lot of these scams. People are calling from other countries, where we have no jurisdiction.”
Detective Greg McMullen with the LBPD Fraud Detail elaborated. “Because of the international nexus, a local law enforcement agency does not have jurisdiction to investigate a matter such as that,” he said. “So we forward the information to the foreign law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction in the area where the phone call was made or the mail was sent.”
In the Ashley case, the LBPD sent the information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which has various task forces that deal with telemarketing fraud originating in the different Canadian provinces.
“However, I will tell you that taking someone into custody in an international scheme is quite rare,” McMullen said, explaining that the complexities of tracking down the criminal’s location and identity on the basis of information gathered from a United States city thousands of mile away present a daunting task to law enforcement agencies in other countries who have a hard enough time dealing with crimes perpetrated against their own citizens. McMullen added that several federal agencies deal with international schemes, but local law enforcement agencies like the LBPD do not have the authority to do so.
McMullen said he gets countless calls like Ashley’s every week, and in every case, there is never a person who physically receives the money in Long Beach. “The victim is asked to bring the money in cash to have it transferred,” he said. “There is no physical interaction between the fraudster and the intended victim.”
He said Ashley was not expecting to meet a person at the liquor store. “My understanding was that there was no meeting that was going to take place,” he said. “It was simply a transfer of money to an individual in Canada.”
He acknowledged that on rare occasions a courier is supposed to pick up the money, but the courier never shows up. “We sit out there and wait and no one ever shows up,” he said. “Typically in these schemes, there is no physical interaction.”
Zapalski and McMullen warned that scams against the elderly are on the rise nationwide. They urged residents to never transfer money or send a check or money orders to companies or businesses without checking to see if they are legitimate.
