I received this in an email this morning and don't remember seeing anything posted about it here. I thought I'd give everyone here a heads-up.

JURY DUTY SCAM: This has been verified by the FBI (their link is also included below). Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It is spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this information and
bingo! Your identity just got stolen. The scam has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma , Illinois , and Colorado . This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into g iving information by pretending they're with the court system. The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Check it out here:

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp
http://www.fbi.gov/page2/june06/jury_scams060206.htm
http://www.scambusters .org/juryduty.html

By Sandysmom on Friday, June 8, 2007 - 10:46 am:

It's amazing. The crooks just keep getting more and more clever. I would never think of such a thing. Thanks so much for sharing this.

By Ginny~moderator on Friday, June 8, 2007 - 01:31 pm:

I've been reading about this for a long time. In general, you should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER give identifying information to someone who calls you or e-mails you. Always ask where they are calling from and NEVER use the call-back phone number or click-through e-mail they give you. Go to the phone book or the entity's website to get the contact information and go from there.

The e-mails look more and more authentic all the time. I've gotten a couple that purport to be from Amazon and when I clicked the button just to see what happened, the web-site looked just like Amazon's. I knew it wasn't because it talked about recent activity in my account. I went to the Amazon website through my own bookmarks and checked my account and I didn't have any recent activity. I did send the spoofing/phishing email to Amazon. Amazon, eBay, and a lot of financial institutions have a way you can send them information about such frauds and Amazon, for one, is suing a lot of web-site owners.

In general, almost all financial institutions and government agencies (federal/state/local) will tell you that they never ask for identifying information by telephone or e-mail, only by letter or in person.