When Barbara Ann Johnson got a call from a telephone scammer Feb. 19, she didn’t hang up on them. Instead, she played two different characters to tempt the two men who called her before finally frustrating their efforts.
Johnson, 82, of Nobleboro, was awakened that morning by a phone call from a man who called himself David King and claimed Johnson was being awarded a $200,000 prize.
“I immediately acted as if I was a demented old woman” in an attempt to lead the man along, Johnson said. She claimed to be Charlene Mertz, a fictional elderly woman who lived alone.
“It took a little bit of heeing and hawing to get the information out, but he had a number for me to call,” she said. King instructed her to call the number and speak to a Mr. Dylan.
Johnson played along, and the two got off the phone with the expectation Johnson would either call the number, or King would call her back.
In the downtime between phone calls Johnson reported the scam to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office.
Johnson did not call the number King provided, and when King rang her back, she feigned a lack of understanding of what was expected of her.
At this point, the man told Johnson she needed to send $5000 to an address in Wisconsin.
“He said I needed to answer some questions, he wanted to know where I banked,” she said.
Continuing in her role as Mertz, Johnson spun another tale about her banking situation, and also confirmed several times for King that she lived alone.
At this point, more than an hour into the whole process and on a third phone call from King, Johnson said King told her someone was coming to her house with the prize money.
She asked him if someone from the newspaper was bringing the prize.
“You don’t want to tell anybody, you don’t want to put it in the newspaper,” King told her before revealing she had won an additional $1.5 million grand prize, which would required an additional $5000 to claim.
“I can just see them drooling now, smacking their lips over a tasty morsel here,” Johnson said.
The next phone call Johnson received was from a different man who said he was the Mr. Dylan that King had mentioned. This time, though, Johnson answered with a different voice as she pretended to be the caregiver for Charlene Mertz.
“You must know she’s a demented old woman,” Johnson told the man, “and I’m her caregiver, and she’s not available to talk to you on the phone and anything she’s told you probably isn’t true.”
Johnson got two further calls from the man saying he was on the way to the house with the prize check and he needed to talk to Mertz.
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Mertz doesn’t have all her marbles,” she told them.
Finally, Johnson received her last call, once again from King. King wanted to know why he couldn’t talk to Mertz.
Johnson said Mertz was busy telling her nephew about the $1.5 million prize she had won.
“Her nephew was very interested, he’s the sheriff of the county here,” she said to King.
King said something about Mertz living in Maine, but Johnson assured him Mertz lived in Westchester County, N.Y., which is where the fictional nephew was sheriff.
Johnson guided the conversation more about what exactly a sheriff is and does, and suddenly the phone went dead.
Despite the time it took from her, Johnson seemed to enjoy taking the time of the two men.
“I loved messing with their heads, it was great,” she said.
According to Lincoln County Sheriff’s Lt. Rand Maker, telephone scams can include lottery scams like the one attempted on Johnson, people claiming to work from Central Maine Power, a credit card company, or the Internal Revenue Service, or even grandchildren claiming to be in jail.
“I would not be releasing personal information to anyone who calls unsolicited,” Maker said. If someone receives an unsolicited call from a company, Maker recommends calling the company back using the contact number on a bill or other paperwork.
“We have people today, when our deputies call and talk to them about certain issues, they may not believe they’re law enforcement officers,” Maker said. “That’s just the world we live in.”
Those people are asked to call the deputies back at the sheriff’s office, he said. Similarly, any company reaching out to a customer would have no issue providing contact information, Maker said.
“If those numbers don’t match up to numbers you have, there potentially could be a problem,” he said.
Maker cautioned against using caller-id as a test, since scammers have ways of faking them.
Maker offered a small piece of advice for anyone who might follow Johnson’s example: “The longer you engage with somebody, the more likely they’re going to call you back.”
