Dept. Of Health and Human Services

Victim Location 55011

Type of a scam Government Grant

I answered my phone and said, "Hi, this is ***." The person who called had a thick Russian-like accent and was very hard to understand. He said he was from the US Dept. of Health and Human Services and that I had been selected based on the fact that my name appeared on a list. He never mentioned what the program name was or any other information about it. To make it on this list apparently you have to had always paid your taxes on time and have not filed for bankruptcy in the past 6 months. I was late before filing my taxes before so, this raised a big red flag for me. He said the grant money was able to be used for any type of financial aid, including going back to school. This raised flag 2 as I assume all things like this would be Dept. of Education. He said his position was a verification officer so he needed to verify some of my information. He then told me my phone number and asked me if that was correct. Then he asked if my name was Jacob (which he could have learned by how I answered my phone. I confirmed that and he said, "Can you verify your last name? A few different ones came up." This was the third flag. Instead of telling him that I said, "actually before I do that, I would like some more information and that I wanted to do more research on this." He then immediately hung up on me. He did not ask for money or anything but I felt like he was trying to get my personal information for some type of identity theft. I tried calling back the number and got the voicemail right away. The voicemail said " the mailbox for Maira Hernandez is full and not accepting messages at this time. There is no way that *** *** called me. The accents the man who called me had was Russian or something very similar.

Victim Location 36110

Type of a scam Government Grant

The phone was from a private number, with the person saying I was to receive grant money from a Govt grant fund. I called the number above and someone else answered and asked for the ID number given to me by someone else. They wanted my acct info I told them I don’t have one, prepaid card, I stated I would go and get one could I call back, tried to call back no answering machine no nothing.