POLICE MAKE ARREST, FILE CHARGES IN SCAM INVOLVING APPLE, GOLD.
According to BSO’s Tamarac District in a statement to BocaNewsNow.com, the scam began last month with a phone call to a 75-year-old woman from someone claiming to be with Walmart’s fraud department, warning her about a fraudulent $1,400 Apple laptop purchase in her name. When she denied making the purchase, she was bounced between several callers before reaching a man who identified himself as “U.S. Marshal Adam Peterson.” He told her that her identity had turned up tied to an abandoned vehicle in Texas loaded with narcotics, cash and evidence of human trafficking, and that a federal arrest warrant had been issued in her name. Her options, he said, were to hire an attorney for $100,000 or cooperate with the investigation to clear her name — all while he rattled off fake badge numbers, case numbers and the names of supposed fellow federal agents to make the story stick.
Believing she had no other choice, the woman did as she was told, liquidating her financial assets and converting the money into gold that the caller said needed to be “secured” until the investigation wrapped up. Detectives say she was instructed to package the gold a specific way, write an account number on it, and stay on the phone with “Marshal Peterson” the entire time. She was given a code to hand off the gold to a courier at a gas station — and only afterward realized she’d been conned out of savings her family had built up over roughly 33 years.
BSO detectives say their investigation led them to Mohit, identifying him as the person who carried out the exchange, allegedly using a red Honda Accord and a grey Jeep SUV in the scheme. He was arrested on a BSO warrant in Bradford County and faces charges including scheme to defraud, grand theft on a person 65 or older, and unlawful use of a two-way communications device. Anyone in a BSO jurisdiction who believes they’ve been targeted by a similar scam is asked to call Detective Steven Lees at 954-720-2225 or BSO’s non-emergency line at 954-764-HELP (4357). BSO stresses that law enforcement will never call demanding money or banking information over the phone…