A 72-year-old Eastlake woman received a phone call from a local number last week. She answered the phone and heard a woman's voice call her "mom" and tell her she needed help. The Eastlake woman hung up the phone, but the same number called back.
She answered again, but this time it was a man on the other line who told her he had kidnapped her daughter and demanded that she give him $10,000 in ransom or her daughter would be killed. The Eastlake woman said she didn't have $10,000 and eventually they agreed that she would pay him $300.
The man instructed her to keep her phone on, in her pocket, and drive to her bank to withdraw the money. She followed his instructions, and, after she withdrew the money, the man directed, her street by street, to drive to the Walmart on H Street in Chula Vista, where he then explained to her how to wire the money to his bank. After she wired the money, the man again gave her street-by-street directions to a location where he asked her to rip up the receipt of the wire transfer and discard it. He told her that she was being followed and had people watching her.
After she threw away the receipt, the woman hung up the phone and called her daughter. She was relieved to find out her daughter was safe, but she told her what happened and said she still believed she was being followed.
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"I’m angry that somebody took my mom's sense of security away, just by calling her on the phone and making her think that one of her children was going to be killed," The Eastlake's woman told NBC 7. "My mom would do anything for her kids."
The family filed a report with the police and attempted to call the company that made the wire transfer to get her money back, but the company said a man had already retrieved the cash in Mexico. Her daughter said they've changed her mom's phone number and installed more security cameras around her house, but they're all still traumatized by what happened.
"I have a lot of fear," the 72-year-old said in Spanish. "I feel that someone is following me, because he knew where I was. He would tell me, 'You're going this way. I have your location. I have your contacts.' Well, I got even more scared."
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Chula Vista police told NBC 7 that they haven't seen an uptick in similar scams recently, but they are encouraging people to be vigilant if they believe something seems suspicious.
