Jury Duty Scam in Georgia - Beware!

  Warning! Jury Duty Scam in Georgia

Recently, I was made aware of people calling Georgians to mine for personal information under the pretext of jury duty.

This message is being forwarded from the Technology Office of the Georgia
> General Assembly. Please take heed.
>
> Rep. Virgil Fludd
>
>
>
> From: Henry, Scott
> Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 9:26 AM
> To: All Users
> Subject: Identity Theft
> Greetings everyone,
>
> We typically do not send out scam warnings however one of our users fell
> prey to this particular one yesterday. The unfortunate user has had to
> place fraud warnings on all of her credit cards and close accounts because
> of it so I thought we best let everyone know.
>
> The local FBI office said this was the first occurrence in Georgia so
> please have a look at it.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Scott
>
> _______________________
>
> "JURY DUTY SCAM:
>
> This has been verified on Snopes.com (link listed below) and by the FBI
> (their link is also included below).
>
> Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It is
> spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take
> those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their
> civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced.
>
> Fall for it and your identity could be stolen, reports CBS. In this con,
> someone calls pretending to be a court official who threateningly says a
> warrant has been issued for your arrest because you didn't show up for
> jury duty. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you
> never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your
> Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the
> information and cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this
> information and bingo! Your identity just got stolen.
>
> The scam has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma ,
> Illinois , and Colorado . This (scam) is particularly insidious because
> they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving
> information by pretending they're with the court system. The FBI and the
> federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites,
> warning consumers about the fraud.
>
> Check it out here:
> http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp
> http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel05/092805.htm "