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DRAPER — Police, responding to a report of a possible abduction Tuesday morning, soon realized they were dealing with nothing more than a phone scam.
Phillip Huerta said he was at work when he received an unexpected call from a number with a 385 area code.
“He was an EMT and there was an accident,” Huerta said. “He’s like, ‘Well, your wife’s okay. She just has a head wound and whatnot, but the person she rear-ended, the gentleman, has a broken leg and a broken collarbone.'”
Bad quickly turned to worse on the call, as Huerta listened to something that sounded like a struggle.
“This other gentleman gets on the line talking like a gangster,” Huerta said. “He’s like, ‘Look here, here’s what’s going on here. Your wife, I told your wife we can settle this without police because my son’s got a warrant, and she was dumb enough to call them.’”
The caller started demanding $4,500 for medical care. Huerta signaled to his boss to call the police as the dialogue became more threatening.
“The whole time, he’s telling me, ‘Don’t get the cops involved, don’t hang up. If you hang up, you’ll never see your wife again, you will never hear from me ever again,’” Huerta explained. “’This all depends on you if you get your wife back to you.’”
Huerta said he didn’t question the call as much as he should have from the beginning because he was worried about the welfare of his wife.
Soon, he found himself in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Draper, trying to arrange an exchange — money for his wife.
The caller, Huerta said, ultimately refused to meet him in person, instead insisting on Huerta wiring money through Western Union. By that time, Draper police had arrived on scene in large numbers.
“We had all of the detectives in unmarked vehicles, our patrol division sitting up on a larger containment area,” said Draper police Sgt. Chad Carpenter. “(That was) just so, if in fact this was real and the suspect did come to the location, we were able to take him into custody and do everything safely so everyone would be safe.”
Carpenter said a detective was eventually able to eavesdrop on the conversation, and soon believed the call was a scam.
“The detective goes, ‘Ask to speak to her,’” Huerta said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I want to speak to my wife.’”
Huerta said the caller went on a tirade.
“He just got upset — ‘Well, you just made a big mistake,’” Huerta recalled of the conversation. “'You’ve got 20 seconds to decide if your wife lives or if she’s gone.’ So I stayed quiet for 20 seconds with the officer sitting right there and he hung up.”
Carpenter said the detective then instructed Huerta to call his wife at work. She was there.
“She got on the phone, I heard she was fine and safe, and I was elated,” Huerta said.
Huerta said in hindsight, the caller was persuasive because he was able to play on the husband’s emotions.
“You don’t really think about anything because you’re so either afraid or upset to get your loved one back that you don’t really think,” Huerta said.
Carpenter said Wednesday detectives were still looking into the call but acknowledged the number was likely spoofed, as many scam calls are.
He encouraged people who find themselves in this type of circumstance to remain calm, pause and question what the caller is saying.
Huerta even suggested actively fact-checking the caller. In his case, he didn’t realize early on that the caller did not know his wife’s name.
“How do we stop this? How do we prosecute this?” Huerta questioned. “There’s got to be a way. They’ve got to be held responsible for what they do.”
