Clara Goletto no longer picks up the phone when calls come from unknown numbers. The last time she did, she lost $2,500.
On March 19, shortly after nine in the morning, Goletto received a call. Her daughter was arrested the night before, so she wasn’t surprised to hear the voice on the other end identify himself as Deputy Humphrey from the Oklahoma County jail.
But she was surprised by the declaration that came next: her daughter, the voice on the line said, had COVID-19. Goletto owed the jail $2,500 for related fees. She was stressed, running on three hours of sleep and was watching her grandchildren, whom she’d assumed temporary care of while their mother was in jail. Goletto was suspicious, but the caller seemed legitimate: he knew her name, her daughter’s name and, even stranger, she later thought, her grandchildren’s names. And, he’d called her directly.
She read aloud her debit card information; the jail only took debit, Deputy Humphrey warned her. Goletto would learn later that credit cards offer significantly stronger fraud protection than debit cards.
Then, there was another charge, for $900, an extended bill on her record that Goletto needed to clear for her daughter to be eligible for bail. She tried to negotiate and succeeded. When the voices on the line — at some point, she said, two other purported jail officials had joined the call — said she could pay off the last charge for $100, Goletto realized she was being scammed.
“Well, that was it,” said Goletto, who’s retired and lives on a fixed income with her husband. “There's all my money. They just got me, and I couldn't do anything about it.”
Bail bond scams are not new, but they’ve become faster and more accurate with the aid of technology and scammers’ unprecedented knowledge of victims’ personal information. Faux bondsmen lingering outside jails, hoping to trap overwhelmed families or the occasional odd call claiming unpaid charges or warrants, are no longer the biggest threat. Today, the calls come immediately after an arrest, accurately address family members by name, and, with artificial intelligence, callers can fake legitimate phone numbers and impersonate real people, such as law enforcement and even the jailed person themselves.
Victims and bondsmen are begging authorities to do more to stop them.
“This is something completely different because it's lightning speed,” said Jessica Hawkins, president of the Oklahoma County Bondsman Association and a bondsman operating out of Oklahoma County, Cleveland County and Canadian County for 15 years. “This is different because it hasn't been shut down.”
Across Oklahoma, stories like Goletto’s — scam calls made to emergency contacts and payments demanded through Cash App, PayPal and Apple Cash, virtual third-party payment options that offer little buyer protection — repeat themselves.
Oklahoma County bondsman Heather Chambers recalled an 83-year-old woman who paid $7,777.68 to a man claiming to be Sergeant Briscoe with an Oklahoma County anger management course for inmates. The phone call lasted several hours and ended with the scammer threatening to kill the bondsman – Chambers – that the woman had contacted.
Three other bondsmen told similar stories:
A young man who got out of jail received a call saying that if he didn’t send money via PayPal to the self-described bondsman on the phone, he’d be re-detained immediately. He sent the money less than 24 hours after his release.
A woman was transferred from federal custody to the Canadian County jail. Within minutes of being booked, the woman’s cousin got a call demanding an electronic payment to bail her out. The scammer knew about the relocation before her family did.
A mother who sent $2,000 via Apple Cash after a man identifying himself as a lieutenant offered her son a place in a pre-trial release program. The mother contacted a lawyer first, who said the call seemed legitimate. Hours later, her son called her. He hadn’t been booked yet.
Concerned bondsmen and victims have rallied law enforcement to conduct investigations and crack down on scammers. In April, a bondsman wrote a letter to the attorney general, detailing the story of a woman scammed.
The attorney general’s office is investigating, according to an agency spokeswoman, and the Oklahoma Insurance Department issued a public warning in March, urging people to verify information with the jail or a licensed bond company and never send money to strangers.
Scammers with accurate details are more believable, and bondsmen don’t always know how they’re obtaining certain information.
Some information is public, such as that found on jail blotters that publish the full name, photo, booking number, charges and bond amount. Facebook accounts such as OKC Jailbirds, which has more than 125,000 followers, post notable arrests daily.
But blotters aren’t live feeds, Hawkins said. Jail blotters are sometimes updated once a day. Some jails don’t update blotters over the weekend.
“It's the amount of time from the person being booked in to their family receiving phone calls that's mind-blowing,” Hawkins said.
And phone numbers and emergency contacts, which arrested people may provide during booking, are not posted on the blotters. Yet, scammers have been able to contact family members within minutes.
Bondsmen noticed an uptick in similar scams in the last year. Over five months, Hawkins counted at least 15 of her clients who were scammed.
Goletto eventually signed a legitimate bail bond contract with A Absolute Bonds. Owner Tracey Halley-Terrell encouraged Goletto to file a police report. But, Halley-Terrell acknowledged, she’s not sure a police report can help. Previous clients filed reports and have been dismissed. Halley-Terrell filed one herself when a scammer claimed to be calling from her business, but police said she was not a victim.
Halley-Terrell, who is president of the Oklahoma Bondsman Association Board, started working as a bondsman in 1997. At the time, she rarely saw scams.
In the early 2010s, they popped up every now and then.
“You might have heard about it every once in a while,” she said. “But nothing like it is right now.”
Some bondsmen have tried to puzzle out clues themselves. A group of state bondsmen track scam calls on a Facebook thread. They tried to find a pattern between the booking officers and clients’ scammed families, but couldn’t.
Julie Trepagnier, a bondsman for nearly 30 years, is in that group of eagle-eyed bondsmen. Cracking down on scams is in the group’s best interest.
“It hits your morale because I'm busting my butt every day to do this, and these people are coming in, stepping on my toes, and then they take people's money,” Trepagnier said. “Then they don't have the money to pay us.
“It breaks my heart for my clients,” Trepagnier said. “But it hurts my business too. Now I don’t have that income.”
Some, including Trepagnier, have tried to track down the scammers themselves. The calls often originate from toll-free or private numbers, or numbers registered to small businesses across the country with seemingly no connection.
One phone number automatically hangs up if called; another is linked to a Google Voice number, which makes tracking down the owner nearly impossible without a subpoena, since the numbers aren’t part of public telephone directories.
Lewis Garrison, director of the bail bond division at the Oklahoma Insurance Department, said the inability to trace phone numbers has made law enforcement investigations harder.
Frustrated with hitting dead ends, bondsmen in December took the issue of scam calls to sheriffs’ departments. Suspecting foul play or moles within jails, they requested an internal investigation and dedicated probes into each scam.
Katie Tolbert, a bondsman in Oklahoma City, complained to the Oklahoma County Detention Center in December and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office in April after a co-signer on one of her bond contracts was scammed out of thousands of dollars. Tolbert suspects it was an inside job and wanted someone held accountable.
“The timing of the contact, coupled with the personal and booking-specific information known to the callers, raised serious concerns regarding the misuse or unauthorized dissemination of inmate intake information,” she wrote to the attorney general.
Tolbert hasn’t received a response.
“It’s very disappointing that no one seems to be taking these scammers seriously,” she said.
Some sheriffs’ offices have posted on Facebook to warn people of the scams, but bondsmen say that’s not enough.
David Stuckman, Professional Bail Agents of the United States president, said he’s pitched a public service campaign to the AARP in hopes the news would reach older audiences more effectively.
Even so, Stuckman said, education may only go so far. He’s discussed the scams with the FBI and has been told that investigators are more focused on multimillion and billion-dollar fraud schemes than scams of a few thousand dollars. And the investigations are hard.
“The sheriff and the police and the FBI and everybody, they can't get ahead of it,” he said.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
