TEMPE, AZ — "It almost felt like I had a gun to my head while I was doing this. Like, I really didn't want to do any of it.”
A Valley father says he lost thousands of dollars to scammers who posed as law enforcement and took the unusual step of meeting him in person to collect the money, marking a concerning escalation in scams targeting Arizona residents.
The victim, who asked not to be identified, sat down with the Let ABC15 Know team to talk about his experience with the hope of helping prevent this from happening to anyone else.
He says it all started with a phone call from someone claiming to be Detective Sean Williams with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department. The caller said the victim had failed to appear for a federal subpoena, and a bench warrant had been issued for his arrest.
The scammer offered the victim two options: meet with a bail bondsman with bail money, or face arrest and wait three to seven days to see a judge. The caller claimed they would hold the money and return it once they verified that the victim never received the subpoena.
"It kind of sounded a little over the top, but not out of the realm of possibility, of, I mean, maybe this is the way it's done," the victim said.
The scammers maintained psychological pressure on him throughout the scheme, claiming they were monitoring his phone, and they told him that he was under a "gag order" requiring him to keep the detective on the line with him at all times.
"They knew when phone calls came in. They knew when messages came in," he said.
When he went to the bank to withdraw money, the caller instructed him to put the phone on speaker phone in his pocket and tell bank employees the money was for "a personal matter."
"It seems like every time you had some type of question, they had an answer," Let ABC15 Know’s Christel Bell asked the victim.
"An immediate answer, and everything sounded so official," he replied.
After withdrawing the money, the victim was directed to a parking lot in Tempe to meet the supposed bail bondsman. He says a woman presented him with her business card as a bail bondsperson.
Then she took his money and said she needed to count it in her car, and then she would take him to the detention center.
"She said, ‘You're gonna go ahead and sign this. You'll get a receipt for giving me the money, and then when we get in there, the receipt will be able to track it through the system.’ And I said, ‘I don't like this.’ And she said, ‘You don't have to do it, but this is how the process works," the victim recalled.
“It was very hesitant. ‘I don’t want to give you this. It’s everything I have.’ She said, ‘It’s a process. You can either do it or you can’t do it. You can either go to jail, and it will take however long, or we can get it done this afternoon,” he added.
"As soon as she dipped around the corner, he said, ‘Gotcha!’” the victim explained.
The bail bondsman disappeared with all his money.
"My heart races every time I think about it. I shake at the shame of not seeing this stuff beforehand in the moment. You just feel so stupid for not seeing it to begin with, letting it happen, letting your entire family down," he said.
Tempe Police are investigating the case. Sergeant Brian Kidd, who handles Fraud and Financial crimes, tells usthat while impersonating law enforcement is a common scam tactic, meeting victims in person to collect money is a troubling new development.
"Have you ever heard of anything like this?" Bell asked Sgt. Kidd.
"No, I haven't heard about that," Kidd replied.
"It is alarming because typically, these are done over the phone. The fact that these are becoming more brazen and happening in person is certainly more concerning," he added.
To protect yourself from similar scams, Sgt. Kidd recommends slowing things down when faced with urgent demands.
"You want to slow down with these scams, like I said, they create the urgency. That's the whole point of it is that you feel like you have to act now," Sgt. Kidd added.
If you receive an unexpected call from someone claiming to be from a law enforcement agency:
- Don't trust caller ID alone — scammers can spoof phone numbers to make calls appear to come from legitimate agencies
- You can always hang up, look up the agency that claimed to be calling, and call them back that way.
Sgt. Kidd emphasized the importance of reporting scams to help prevent others from becoming victims.
"We need to know about it. So that we can investigate it and prevent this from happening to other people," Sgt. Kidd said.
The victim hopes sharing his story will help others understand how elaborate scams are becoming.
"You can't hear enough of the warning signs of how they're doing it. I always thought I was at least decently smart, like this. This couldn't happen to me, and then it did," he said.
The victim's daughter has set up a GoFundMe account to help the family recover from their financial loss.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
