Objection: A Fake Detective Called My Cell Phone

A detective called me last week. He was with a precinct three states away, which was my first clue that something was off. I let it go to voicemail. Then I did the thing I’d tell any of you to do: I looked up that precinct’s real main number myself, called it, and asked whether a detective by that name actually worked there.

He didn’t. The whole thing was a scam.

I spent 15 years as a public defender in Manhattan. I’ve stood next to people at every stage of an arrest, from the first knock to the arraignment, so I can tell you exactly where this call was headed if I’d picked up.

The play is always the same. Someone calls pretending to be law enforcement. He tells you there’s a warrant out for your arrest. Maybe you missed jury duty. Maybe you skipped a court date you never had. Then comes the fear, fast and heavy, because fear is the whole product here. He tells you it can all disappear right now if you just pay a fee over the phone, usually by gift card, wire transfer, or crypto.

That last part is your tell. No real detective is calling you to collect money so you can avoid being arrested. Warrants don’t get cleared by reading numbers off the back of a Target gift card. That is not how any of this works, and I would know.

But here’s the part that actually keeps me up at night, and it has nothing to do with the call itself. How did this guy get my cell number in the first place?

Data brokers. There are entire companies whose whole business is scraping your name, your phone number, your home address, the names of your family members, and where you work, then packaging all of it into a neat little profile and selling it to anyone willing to pay. Scammers buy it. Stalkers buy it. Anyone who wants to find you buys it. The fake detective didn’t need to be clever. He just needed twenty dollars and a website.

That’s exactly why I use DeleteMe. They go out and find your personal information sitting on hundreds of these data broker sites, get it taken down, and keep monitoring so it doesn’t quietly creep back up. I’m not spending my weekends filing removal requests with hundreds of sketchy sites one by one. DeleteMe does it for me and sends me a report showing exactly what they pulled down.

If you want to try it, go to joindeleteme.com/EORLINS and use code EORLINS for 20% off.

A quick note on how this all runs: I don’t paywall any of this. Everything I write here stays free, because the whole point is to get this information to as many people as possible. But this is a one-woman operation, and if you want to help keep it going, you can become a paid subscriber for $8 a month.

And thank you to DeleteMe for keeping me safe, and for sponsoring this one.