An 87-year-old woman from Sun City Hilton Head lost thousands of dollars after a group of scammers sent an Uber to her driveway and ferried her to a local bank under false pretenses.
It was a rare, in-person variant of a commonly reported scam tactic where criminals imitate public officials and demand targets send “bond money” to evade a fabricated punishment. Local scams drain millions of dollars from Beaufort County residents’ wallets every year, fueled increasingly by fraudulent cryptocurrency payments made through Bitcoin ATMs and similar machines.
The resident of Sun City’s Basket Walk neighborhood told police she first received a call from the scammers on April 4. Claiming they were from the “public defender’s office,” the caller said the woman’s relative had been in a car accident and she needed to pay a cash bond to “secure his release.”…