It was as though one of those email scams came to life and eventually cost a retired DeKalb County woman $20,000 in savings.
The scam started at the Kroger shopping plaza on Chamblee-Tucker Boulevard in late April, according to a police incident report and the victim.
The victim told police a well-dressed woman with an accent approached her when she left the grocery store. The woman told the victim she spoke little English, and she had inherited $450,000 from an uncle who, before he died, had instructed her to give the money to a church.
The scammer told the victim she was supposed to meet someone at a McDonald's restaurant who spoke her language -- Swahili -- who would take her to the church, according to the police report.
The woman offered to pay the victim $100 to drive her to the McDonald's and displayed a handbag stuffed with money, police said. The woman also showed the victim a letter from her ‘uncle' with instructions on what to do with the ‘inheritance,' the victim said.
"I told her I'm not interested in the money, but you're going to get killed out here showing it to people," the victim told the AJC in a phone interview. She agreed to drive the woman to a nearby McDonald's, where they encountered a man in the parking lot who claimed to be a manager.
The scammer showed the man her bag of cash and recounted her story, according to the victim. The man advised the woman to get a cashier's check and asked the victim to drive them to a bank.
The victim agreed and drove them to a nearby Wells Fargo bank. The man went inside, then came out and showed the women a $20,000 cashier's check. He then went back into the bank and came out with what appeared to be $20,000 in cash, the victim said.
The man then told the scammer to go get a cashier's check, according to the victim.
The victim recounts what happened next: "She says to him ‘You're a man and can do business. I'm a woman, I can't.'"
So, the man asked the victim to go into a bank to get a cashier's check to show that a woman can do business in a bank, the victim told police.All the while, the female scammer was in the back seat promising she had more money in a deposit box at the bus station, according to the victim.
The victim then drove to her bank, SunTrust, and got a cashier's check for $20,000. While in the bank, the victim said she became suspicious. But she said she was afraid to stop cooperating.
She said the man then told her to drive to another SunTrust and cash her cashier's check.
"At this point, I realized I had made a huge mistake," the victim said."Nobody knows where I am. There's no one to check on me. Anything can happen to me."
"I'm in big trouble. If I can get out alive, I'm going to do this. My life is worth more than $20,000," she said she told herself.
The victim said that after cashing her cashier's check, she returned to her car and the man took the money and put it in his socks. The couple then got out of the victim's car and got into a black SUV with tinted windows and drove away, the victim said.
The money was a major loss for the victim," she said.
"I live on a fixed income. I worked three jobs most of my life. I retired from the Navy, then worked at Sears for 33 years, and worked in a hair salon nights and weekends. I just got frightened and panicked," she said. "You never know what they would have done to me."
DeKalb County police are investigating the incident but have made no arrests in the case, according to the victim.
In October, in a similar incident in Athens, an 87-year-old woman was scammed out of $4000 and two diamond rings.
Authorities warn senior citizens to be mindful of such scams.
“They pick the elderly for a number of reasons. A lot of times they have some money and they are a little more susceptible to some fast talking,” Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry said at the time of the Athens scam.
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