Her phone rang, the screen lighting up with her sister’s name and contact photo — but it wasn’t her sister on the line.
At around 7 a.m. a few weeks ago, Beth Royce answered an early phone call from someone whom she believed to be her sister, only to hear a man’s voice threatening to kill her sibling if she didn’t send money.
“It’s so hard for me to describe to you how real this all sounded,” Royce, based in Pittsburgh, said in a viral TikTok clip earlier this month. “I’m not an idiot, I’m so good at spotting phishing emails, I’m so good at spotting spam calls, I never fall for anything.”
“And this was the realist, scariest mom of my entire life — literally.”
A man who “sounded completely unhinged” and “crazy” was screaming at Royce for money, as a woman sobbed in the background of the call.
Royce said in the video, which garnered 8.4 million views, that she fully believed the scam was real, so she sent the unknown man $1,000 because she was “terrified” he would actually harm her sibling.
Royce’s mother just happened to be in town visiting, and promptly called the sister to see if she was in danger.
The sister was safe and sound.
The Post has reached out to Royce for comment.
Royce admitted the incident “traumatized” her, and is now warning others who may receive the same call to “hang up and then immediately call back because it’ll call your actual contact.”
Users flooded the TikToker’s comment sections with comforting messages — and a few jokes — while some even claimed it had happened to them, too.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7207863411902778666?lang=en-US&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fnypost.com%2F2023%2F03%2F31%2Fi-thought-my-sister-was-kidnapped-it-was-a-phone-call-scam%2F&embedFrom=oembed
“As a 911 dispatcher, this happens a lot. It’s very scary,” wrote one person.
“I still can’t believe human beings can put other human beings through this kind of fear & turmoil,” stated a shocked user. “The lack of empathy is shocking. I’m so sorry.”
“Jokes on them, I don’t pick up my phone,” quipped another.
“Our family has a code word,” shared someone else. “If there is a real emergency we all say the word. It confirms it’s real and not a joke. We started this during the 80s.”
But this terrifying phone scam, dubbed “caller ID spoofing,” isn’t the first of its kind.
Chelsie Gates, another TikToker, shared her own account of a similar scam last year, believing that someone had taken her mother hostage.
She was swindled out of $100 via CashApp after the criminal threatened to kill her mom.
Immediately after sending the money and ending the call, she rang the number back to get ahold of her mother — but she had no idea what had happened.
“She had no idea what I was talking about,” Gates said in a video.
Earlier this month, FBI Miami field office released an urgent warning regarding the so-called “grandparent fraud scheme,” where “victims are told that a grandchild is under arrest and needs bail money.”
The agency reported that from January 2020 to June 2021 there were 650 reports about the potential scam to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. Such hoaxes, they said, have cost people millions.
Zacharia Baldwin, the supervisor of the Miami branch’s complex financial crimes squad, made it clear in the statement that law enforcement and legal professionals would never “conduct business in this manner,” in reference to requesting bail money on behalf of a grandchild.
“These scammers do their research on social media platforms and dating sites in order to make their demands sound feasible and try to create a false urgency in order to get their victims to act immediately,” Baldwin added.
