While TikToker Meg (@phatgirlmeg) was at work, a coworker messaged the office to let them know something was wrong. So, this girl received a call from a deputy claiming that she had missed jury duty, and in order to avoid going to jail, she needed to withdraw all the money from her bank account and bring it to Walgreens.
After she emptied her bank account, the “deputy” called her back and told her not to tell anyone about this transaction. They instructed her to take the money to Walgreens.
She messaged someone on her company tablet about the situation, and a coworker told her that it was clearly a scam.
They told her not to answer the phone and to put her money back into her account. The girl had no idea that it was a scam. It was a close call, but it could’ve been a whole lot worse.
Many TikTok users flooded the comments section with their own scam horror stories.
It turns out that this kind of fraud is a lot more common than you’d think, and people of all ages fall for it.
“This happened to a girl I know. They told her to put money on the gift cards and send it to them so they can put the money in her account. She actually went to do it till the Walgreens employees had to tell her it was a scam,” commented one user.
“My MIL fell for something like this, but they told her to take the cash from the store’s register and to put it into their Bitcoin machine. She believed it and did it all because they knew the manager’s name,” shared another.
“In 2014, they got the night manager of a grocery store I was working at. She emptied the store safe and her personal bank accounts as well and put it all on some prepaid cards to give to ‘the FBI’ over the phone,” added a third.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
The moral of the story here is that the law does not do business at random retail pharmacy locations. So, if a so-called deputy is threatening jail time over the phone unless you make a pit stop at Walgreens, guard your cash closely and block the number for good measure.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
