A South Bryan resident is offering a warning to others after he received a call from someone who tried to scam him out of his credit card number.
The man, who wished to remain anonymous, said he received a call around 5:30 a.m. on his landline phone from a private number. The caller said she wished to inform him of suspicious charges on his credit card.
“This female with a slight Hispanic accent said our Visa credit card had been charged with $800 on a Home Depot online charge,” he said.
The man said the woman asked for his account number, at which point he had his wife talk to the woman while he called his credit card company to verify these charges.
“They told me, ‘Sir, you don’t have a Visa card, you have a MasterCard,’” he said.
The woman never identified herself or a company, he said, but simply told them someone was trying to use their card and asked the man to verify the card number by reading it back to her. 
He didn’t – and hung up the phone instead, he said.
Scams like these have always been around, but Detective Mickey Sands with the Bryan County Sheriff’s Department said they are becoming more and more prevalent.
“Fraud is picking up,” Sands said. “I’m getting at least one report a week and it’s really hard to combat.”
In fact, between July 28 and Sept. 25, crime reports from the Bryan County Sheriff’s Department indicate that at least 10 separate incidents of fraudulent activity associated with credit cards and identity theft have been reported.
Read more in the Oct. 1 edition of the News.