Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office wants to make the public aware of a scam that has been reported in our area.
The victim recently received a phone call and from a caller who claimed he worked with AT&T. The victim said the suspect said he was calling to inform him of an expected service interruption, which would last approximately 20 minutes. Allegedly, the interruption was to upgrade service from 4G to 5G.
Per OCSO, the caller told the victim he would receive an automatic AT&T message with a new PIN code. The victim received the message (which was formatted like AT&T’s actual automated messages) and subsequently provided the PIN code to the caller.
A short time later, the victim and his wife’s phones went out of service. The victim then received a call from their banks fraud department, indicating they noticed three unusual charges on their account — made through the victim’s wife’s card from AT&T for a total amoung of $1,504.00. It was discovered the charges were made from Dallas, Texas.
The victim contacted AT&T through another person’s phone and was ultimately informed the phone number the caller called from, which was 1 -888-333-6651, was flagged in their system as fraudulent.
The victim’s phones had been completely removed from the account and had to be reactivated. Per OCSO, the charges were from someone purchasing new phones and adding them to the account.
