LINCOLN–(KFOR Apr. 13)–A Lincoln bank managed to catch a fraud, after they said a man was scammed out of nearly $160,000 over the course of the past seven years.
Lincoln Police public information manager Erika Thomas on Monday morning said that staff at the Nebraska Bank of Commerce contacted LPD on Friday, after they determined a 34-year-old Murdock man was a victim of a fraud. The victim was first contacted through social media in 2019 and after messaging back and forth, the scammer threatened to make a false report unless the victim paid $1,000 a month. That later increased to $1,500 to $2,000 a month, according to Thomas.
Those payments continued until this past January, with an estimated loss of $150,000. Thomas says money was used to buy iTunes gift cards and the numbers were given by the victim over the phone to the scammer. The victim stopped responding to the initial scammer when he received several letters and emails that claimed to be from the IRS, Superior Court of Justice in Washington, DC, a Department of Justice attorney and U.S. Fraud Protection…