An elderly woman in Texas was seconds away from being scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars when an alert bystander called police and helped save the woman.
Myndi Jordan said she knew something was wrong when she saw the woman frantically shoving hundred dollar bills into a cryptocurrency machine at the gas station in White Settlement on Thursday.
‘What you’re doing is committing a crime! That makes it my problem!’
“She’s all bent down trying to put hundred dollar bills in,” said Jordan. “And I could hear the people on the phone and I’m like, ‘Ma’am, do you know these people?’ and she’s like no.”
Jordan said she suspected the woman in her eighties was the victim of a scam, but she couldn’t persuade her to stop shoving money into the machine. She said that woman had already put in $23k of her money into the machine.
“The lady was just really, really scared she had $44,000 cash money in her hands,” Jordan added. “I said, Ma’am, I believe you’re being scammed. And she said, ‘No, no, no. It’s the bank, I got to pay this back.’”
When that didn’t work, Jordan alerted the police and Sgt. James Stewart arrived at the gas station and spoke to the woman. She told him that she was being directed by a person at Chase Bank to send her money to a cryptocurrency account.
KCPQ-TV obtained body camera video of the interaction and published clips of it in its news report.
“This woman was just a couple of years older than my own mom and I couldn’t imagine someone doing this to her,” Stewart said.
The video shows Stewart taking the phone from the woman and yelling at the scammer.
“She is not clicking on anything!” says Stewart to the scammer. “Do you really want to fight this fight with me?!”
“It is not your problem,” says the man on the other end of the phone.
“Yes, it is my problem! Because what you’re doing is committing a crime! That makes it my problem!” he answers.
‘The only thing that could’ve made it better is if I could’ve gotten my hands on him.’
The officer said that the woman was moments away from sending thousands of dollars to the scammer and losing that money forever.
“I was irritated. Not just as a police officer but as a human being,” said Stewart.
The woman was able to file a fraud report with the company that runs the cryptocurrency machine and will receive her money back.
“It has nothing to do with vulnerability, really. It has to do with the terror and the bullying that these people do to them,” said Stewart. “The only thing that could’ve made it better is if I could’ve gotten my hands on him. I would’ve loved to have taken him to jail.'”
Stewart said that after the ordeal, the woman hugged him and thanked him for his help.
Experts say that scammers can spoof phone numbers and people who suspect they are being scammed should hang up when they receive a call and instead call in to the company through a confirmed phone number. They said people should avoid giving personal information to people over the phone and added that institutions will not ask people to send money via cryptocurrency.
White Settlement is a suburb of Fort Worth with about 18k residents.
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