Gomez Wants Investigation Into Scam Using Fake FCC Staffer
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez is asking the Enforcement Bureau to investigate scam calls targeting San Francisco’s Chinese community, one of which involved a scammer posing as a Mandarin-speaking FCC employee. “This is why it's so important for government to continue…
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to reach communities who may be targets of these sophisticated scams in the languages they speak,” Gomez posted Friday on X. The call is part of a wave of scams in March involving callers posing as police officers and health care providers, said the San Francisco Police Department in an online warning. In many instances, the caller posed as a Chinese health care provider and convinced the recipient that someone had submitted their personal data to make a health care claim in China. "The suspects then transferred the calls to other suspects, who claimed to be police officers from a city in China. The suspects claimed they wanted to file police reports for the victims’ compromised personal information,” SFPD said. This eventually led to callers being persuaded to use apps like Skype for video calls with people dressed as police officers as part of the scam, it said. In the incident with the false FCC employee, the scammer connected the victim “to several suspects posing as different Chinese police officers in multiple Chinese cities,” and the victim was eventually persuaded to wire $23,000 to clear their name of a supposed crime.