Jury Duty Scam

Jury Duty Scam DO NOT DELETE WITHOUT READING ! This has been veri fied by the FBI (their link is also included below).Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It isspreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us takethose summonses for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out ontheircivic duty, that a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you neverreceived a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your SocialSecurity number and date of birth so he or she can verify the informationand cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this information andbingo; your identity was just stolen. The fraud has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma ,Illinois , and Colorado . This (swindle) is particularly insidiousbecause they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people intogiving information by pretending they are with the court system. The FBIand the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their websites, warning consumers about the fraud. Check it out here: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/june06/jury_scams060206.htm And here: http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp Yep! It's true

  While attending jury dooty last week we were warned of the scam...

If they call, tell them that you are busy at the moment and ask for a number to call them back at. Most times, they will hang up. Problem solved.

I'd make sure that you do respond to the legit people though.  For over ten years I could easily get my more fragile patients out of the stress of jury duty with a simple letter but in the last few years I have found that the court is ignoring the letters and making people come in and state their case.  I had to report for duty last year and the judge was really hard on everyone asking to be released.  One guy explained that his wife had had a stroke and he was the sole caretaker for her.  The judge said that he had given enough of a reason to be released from this summons, but if he didn't sit for duty now, he would have to go right downstairs and sign up for the next time that he would be available for.

Then the judge turned to us prospective jurors and said:  "I want you to know that a lot of people that were given jury summons did not report today...and every one of them will be required to come before a judge and answer why they didn't show up."  He sounded like they were really getting serious about those who were ignoring their summons.

The bottom line is not to give your information over the phone to anyone.
Any legitimate entity will not ask and if they do they will understand if you don't want to give it over the phone.

As for the state gov't in this case jury coordinators, they don't call to follow up. All correspondense from the state is via us mail.

Stoggie