The potential for people to be swindled out of their hard-earned money isn’t going to lessen this year according to the St. Joseph Police Department.

“We will see an increase in it because it’s easy and it’s very easily done and quite frankly it’s very hard to catch,” said Detective Richard Shelton with the St. Joseph Police Department. “There will be an increase in scams and an increase in new scams.”

2015 was a year that also saw an increase in scams.  Shelton talks about some of the big ones in the St. Joseph area.

“We saw several of the ‘Grandma Scams’ in which someone pretends to be a grandson or a granddaughter mostly a grandson and calls their grandmother and the grandmother thinks they’ve been in another country or an accident and that they need money and they need the money wired or sent to them,” Shelton said. “If I call you up and I say with kind-of-a-cutting-out-background and say this is such-n-such and she says ‘Billy is that you?’ Then you become Billy really quick and Billy’s in trouble, Billy’s in jail, Billy had an accident, Billy needs money. Then another caller may say ‘I’m Billy’s attorney and I need money.'”

Also a top one in the area in 2015, Craig’s List scams.

“That’s probably one of our hottest items here,” Shelton said. “People get on Craig’s List and they’re either taken by trying to buy something or they’re trying to sell something and someone wants to send them a check.  They have it on Craig’s List for $200 and someone sends them a check for $1,200 and then they cash the check and they wire the money back to the person of $1,000 and they think they’ve done really well until they find out the check that they cashed was counterfeit and then they owe the place that cashed that check.”

Asphalt and roof coating scams were still an issue last year.

“People are walking around in Spring and Fall and still falling for coating of roofs and coating of asphalt,” Shelton said. “When you have an asphalt driveway put in it’s pretty expensive but when you do it for a few hundred dollars and you think you’re really getting a bargain but you really didn’t get a bargain and you really didn’t get a driveway then you’ve been scammed.”

Then there were the phone and email scams.

“People open emails and they don’t even know who this person is or where they’re coming from,” Shelton said. “There are so many scams that you can deal with it’s hard to figure out which are the top.”

A majority of the scams originate in foreign countries.

“Some of them still believe them especially our seniors. They still believe they’re going to win the big bucks, they’re going to win the lottery, that there’s money out there to be had,” Shelton said. “When we tell them that that money is being used to support war efforts against our nation they still don’t get it.  Most of those scams originate in a country where we do not even have extradition with.  Once they go outside the city limits of St. Joe we can’t go out and arrest them.”

Once someone plays into a scam many times their name gets put on a list.

“I had one gentleman last year who lost over $60,000 in scams with people just mailing things to him and him playing along on the phone,” Shelton said. “Once their name gets out there it’s in all these rooms in these small countries up on a board.  Those people their whole job all day long is to call these numbers and get some sort of scam to get money, and they do it and they’re very successful at it.”

He said the best thing to do is hang-up.

New scams that hit St. Joseph in 2015 was a warrant scam where an individual pretended to be a law enforcement officer calling residents to inform them they have a warrant out for their arrest unless they pay-off a fine.  Another, a utility shut-off scam where the scammer calls businesses and tells them if they didn’t pay a supposedly overdue utility bill the power was going to be shut-off.

Shelton said this year he expects scams to continue to increase and change.

“We will see new scams that we’ve never seen before and somebody will come up with something new and it will work for awhile until we get the broadcast out on it and people get tuned-in and then they’ll create another new one.  So it’s just kind-of an ongoing vicious cycle of new scams,” Shelton said.