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Unfortunately, scams are relatively popular across the country and a new scam trend has hit Harris County. Recently, authorities in Precinct 4 have been dealing with incidents where scammers pretend to be Constable Mark Herman himself.

The constable is working to get the message out after several people nearly fell for these. One scam was online and one was over the phone.

As far as the online scam goes, a scammer using an IP address from Nigeria created a fake profile of Constable Herman and then asked for donations to charity over Facebook messenger. That one was reported and Facebook shut down the account.

Just this week, a local bank teller was able to stop an elderly woman from giving $1,400  to a scammer over the phone. The woman was told that she failed to appear in court and that she had two options, to pay a fine, or get arrested.

“So they are using the charity route and they are also using the you have a warrant out. Well, what we want people to know is that we would never call you and ask for money for charities,” Constable Herman explained.

Real authorities are also not going to call to say they are coming to arrest you unless you withdraw money from the bank either.

In this case, Constable Herman says the scammer was very convincing and had done his research. He knew the woman’s address and told her to go to a grocery store on Spring Cypress Road to buy these prepaid debit cards.

Constable Herman said he feels confident they’re going to be able to make an arrest in this case even though the woman didn’t end up losing money- terroristic threat and harassment charges could come into play.

The constable also said there are likely more victims of this scam and he’s asking for them to come forward so they can try to get to the bottom of it.