What fooled Joey Rosati was something he never expected a scammer to say: Go to the sheriff’s office.
The call came while he was at Costco, and by the end of it, he was minutes away from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, his half-full shopping basket left sitting in the aisle. A man claiming to be a sheriff’s deputy told Rosati to come to the station for failing to appear for jury duty.
“I’m thinking, that’s easy, like why would a scammer ever tell you to go to the sheriff’s department?” Rosati said.
The answer: to keep him on the phone. Rosati talked to the scammer for more than 20 minutes, and their true goal only became clear at the end of his drive, when a second caller told him he needed to bring $9,000 in payment for “fines” to an alternate location.
Rosati detailed his experience in a post on X that soon went viral, racking up 10 million views. He said he has received dozens of “gut-wrenching” messages from others who were scammed — some who lost thousands of dollars. In Rosati’s view, more people need to hear these stories to understand that scammers are constantly improving their techniques.
🚨 Just received a phone call from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office this afternoon. Officer reads off his badge number & proceeds to ask if this is [my name] located at [my address] w/ SSN# [reads last 4 of my social]. f*ck. Was walking through Costco as I took the call.
— Joey Rosati | SMB + Hard $ + VC (@rosaticorp) May 31, 2024
A tech-savvy venture capitalist and small business owner, Rosati, 32, is familiar with common scam techniques. He knew not to volunteer personal information or send money to a stranger over the phone. But he didn’t see how what the caller described as a “courtesy notification” of his failure to appear for jury duty could be one. After all, they weren’t asking for money, just a quick trip to the sheriff’s office.
“The questions I asked and their diligence and professionalism in how they answered them was so believable,” Rosati said. “It’s not like they’re sitting there screaming at you. It’s just a stern officer voice saying, ‘Hey, you missed this, we can clean this up pretty quickly here.’”
If Rosati still had doubts, the scammer had plenty of accurate personal information about him. The man on the phone gave Rosati’s full name, address, and the last four digits of his social security number. He also appeared to know that Rosati had recently relocated.
“They must have had a database of when I moved, because they said, ‘by chance, have you moved in the last couple weeks? Because we show that this should have arrived on April 29,’” Rosati said. “That was literally the week I moved.”
Related: Scammers pose as Tampa Bay sheriffs to threaten people for nude photos, sex videos
Bryan Oglesby, a spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau of West Florida, said it’s not uncommon for scammers to know personal details about their targets.
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Explore all your optionsFor example, hackers may break into the databases of large companies and sell private customer data to scammers on the dark web, a portion of the internet where users make anonymous and sometimes illegal transactions. In other cases, Oglesby said, scammers may rely on information their targets shared through social media.
The call also displayed the actual phone number of the sheriff’s office, an increasingly common technique by scammers known as “spoofing.” When Rosati asked if he could hang up and call back — in part to make sure he was speaking with a real deputy — the man on the phone said he could, telling Rosati to ask for him by his badge number.
“He was bluffing me, and so I didn’t hang up the phone. I didn’t call the sheriff,” Rosati said. He looked up the badge number and name the caller gave, and they were genuine.
Once he was transferred to a second caller who told him to pay fines, though, Rosati immediately hung up and called the sheriff’s office, who told him he wasn’t the first to call that day about this scam.
“Even if you do go down the pathway in speaking to a scammer, eventually, the money hook’s gonna come,” Rosati said. “That’s where you just gotta be sharp.”
Hillsborough County Clerk of Court and Comptroller Cindy Stuart, whose office administers jury summons, said the only way you’ll face fines for missing jury duty is after appearing in court — and even that’s rare.
“You typically just get put back into the queue and you will be called again,” Stuart said. “It’s up to the judge to impose a fee or a fine.”
And if you were facing a penalty, Stuart said, a deputy would never call you about it.
“The sheriff’s office is never going to call you and tell you that they’re going to come arrest you or that you owe a fine,” she added.
Stuart said she has had at least 10 calls or texts from friends and family who experienced the jury duty scam or knew someone who had. Her office alerted Florida court clerks and comptrollers of the scam in October, prompting a statewide advisory.
In recent months, the U.S. District Court, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office have also issued warnings about a rise in jury duty scams.
Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Casey Minuto wrote in an email that the office “provides information to educate the public about these scams and how to protect themselves.
“We take these threats very seriously,” she wrote.
According to George Burruss, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, the best thing you can do during this kind of phone call is not let anxiety take over, even if the caller claims to be trying to help.
“Scammers have realized that soft sell and low pressure at first can result in a larger payoff later,” Burruss wrote in an email. “These scams have become sophisticated, and that tends to get around people’s suspicion.”
For Rosati, a major takeaway was how many people have lost money to scammers — even those who know about common scams and have grown up in the online age.
“What I’m learning is, I think a lot more people are getting scammed by this, but a lot of people just don’t speak up because they’re so embarrassed,” he said.
“As soon as you feel like you’re smarter than them, they’re going to outsmart you.”
