Main Arm woman a victim of death threat scam

Chris Dobney

A Main Arm woman is sleeping easier now that two days have passed since she received a crude but disturbing death threat by email and phone.

On Wednesday the reader, who has asked for her name to be withheld, was in town when she noticed an email on her phone with her name and home phone number in the subject line.

‘Some one paid me to kill you get spared for 48 hours to pay me $15,000 dollars,’ the email read.

‘If you inform the police or any body, DEATH IS PROMISED GET BACK TO ME,’ the emailer demanded.

Not long afterwards, her husband received a phone call on the same home number from ‘a man with a rough voice who asked if my wife was home’.

‘I asked who was talking. I’ve learned not to say “yes” to these people because they can record your “yes” and use it for all kinds of purposes,’ the victim’s husband said.

‘He said with a deep voice and gangster like, “Yo man, I’ve sent her an email and she has to answer immediately!”

‘He sounded like an American guy but he didn’t last long because I realised it was a scam and hung up.

‘We get all sorts of scam phone calls and they all come with different ideas to get our attention,’ the husband said.

The reader said that on returning home she called the police and was referred to ACORN, the Australian Cyber Crime Online Reporting Network. She made a full report on the website.

‘They were surprised. They hadn’t heard of this scam yet,’ she said.

She also contacted Google as the scammer had used a gmail address to make the threat.

‘They have an online form where you can report this kind of thing – Google policies don’t allow this to be done using gmail,’ she said.

‘The first night I locked all the doors in the house, which is something I don’t normally do,’ she added, ‘because I was a bit scared and unsettled.

‘But by yesterday I was back to normal. I know enough not to fall for these kind of things. It was just one of those very nasty scams.’