Telephonic Fraud #911

It was in the month of May, 2014, Saturday morning, when I woke up with a call on my cell phone that displayed "911 calling". I was a little bit shocked and confused seeing 911 calling me. I picked up the call and there was a male voice who introduced himself as (state name) State Police Officer and he addressed me with my name. Below is the conversation:

Fake Cop: Hello Miss XXX (my name), I am state police officer and I need to talk to you in alone. Please make sure there is no one around. There is case registered against you in your native country (he knew my native country name) and we need to deport you back.

Me: What is the case about and who has filed it?

Fake Cop: Shut up Ma'am, and listen to me. Tell me where are your immigration documents?

Me: With me

Fake Cop: where are you right now?

Me: I am at my home.

Fake cop: What location?

Me: I told the city name I was in.

Fake Cop: When did you entered United States?

Me: A year back

Fake Cop: What Date?

(He repeatedly asked me about my present location.)

Before  answering to his question, my husband told (who was besides me then) me not to give any details over phone and the moment the Fake Cop heard another voice, he abruptly ended the call. But as I wasn't sure if that was a fake call, I called up at 911 and narrated the whole incident and the lady over phone told me few things:

1. 911 never calls people upfront, they only call when there was any call made by your phone on 911. So they simply call back whenever they find out there has been any call made on 911.
2. Any officer would never talk to you in that rude manner  (as he said Shut up to me).
3. If the call has been disconnected because of any reason, officer should call you back. If you don't receive call from him, you may want to check at the nearest police office about the authenticity of the call.

She said there is high probability that the call was fake but if I want to check this wit the local police she would report them on my behalf. I asked her to do so. She said an officer from local police would call me and I will have to narrate the whole thing to him/her. I asked her how can I be sure that the cop who will be calling me is a Real cop or not.

And then she said, one can always ask for the identity of a cop before giving any personal details. 

I did received a call from an officer and as I was in a bit of shock with the whole incident, I wasn't able to trust the cop and hence I asked him for his identity. He gave his name and mentioned to me that I will receive a call from the police office validating his identity. So it did happened.

Then I narrated the whole thing to the officer.

Real cop: What was the Officer's name who called you?

Me: He didn't mentioned his name, he only said that he is from State police.

Real cop: What did he said, what kind of case has been registered against you? Is it a criminal case?

Me: He just said a case has been filled against you in your native country and when I asked him about the case details, he asked me to shut up.

Real cop: How long was the conversation? And what time?

Me: 5-6 min. At around 8 AM.

Real cop: First of all, State police has nothing to do with what happens outside America. If at all there is something legal going on, immigration department is the one who should be interfering not state police. And secondly, if an officer wants to arrest you, he wouldn't call and alert you, he would simply come and arrest. And even if the call got disconnected, officers do call back which was not the case with you.

And then the officer asked for my details like DL no. and address and he ran the details in the database to be sure on any warrant against me and he found nothing. Hence it was confirmed that it was a fake call.

I googled on this and found out that many people have got such fake calls from 911 and the caller usually asks for money (usually 2000-5000$) to avoid arrest.
Here are few cases I found:
http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2013/08/22/h-1b-visa-holder-a-call-from-911-beware/
http://h1bwiki.com/uscis-911-scam-phone-calls/


This might be fun for those who make money through such fraud calls by threatening innocent people, but it surely disturbs the victim and those who fell for them, loose  money as well.
As there are many such threats coming up these days, I think this needs to be investigated and these criminals should be taught a good lesson. It's hard for people to to understand the difference b/w genuine and fake if they get call from 911 itself. Hacking needs to be stopped. This is really serious.