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SALT LAKE COUNTY -- A would-be scammer decided to mess with the wrong elderly woman.
Clara Whitson says she may be 83 years old, but she knows you don't get something for nothing. So when a heavily-accented man claiming to be a U.S. Customs agent in New Jersey called her April 4, she became suspicious.
He asked her to go to the FedEx area of a nearby Wal-Mart, bring $250, and she would get more than $1 million.
Whitson told the man she would call her bank, but she called the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office instead.
The man called her back eight times after that. At one point Whitson even answered her phone with a phony accent, saying, "Tony's Pizza. You vant a pizza?"
Whitson tells the Deseret News even after the police confronted the man on the phone, he called her back and said, "You think I'm a fraud." Whitson says she told him she knew he was a fraud, and said, "Shame on you!"
Lt. Don Hutson of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office told the Deseret News, "She did exactly the right thing and did not provide any personal information and immediately contacted us so we could get it documented."
E-mail: aadams@ksl.com
