ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24\/7. Click here to watch<\/a><\/p>\nA northwest Indiana woman walked into her local bank and was just minutes away from withdrawing money.<\/p>\n
She was going to bring that money to people who she thought were law enforcement, but it was all a scam.<\/p>\n
“I was terrified; the gentleman seemed extremely gruff,” Carey Scheck said.<\/p>\n
Scheck said it started with a call from a local number.<\/p>\n
“They kind of get you in this cycle of thinking, ‘well, I guess I have to figure this out. I got to take care of this … the sense of urgency,'” Scheck said.<\/p>\n
The threatening call was from a man impersonating a police officer who told her she failed to show up in court for jury duty and needed to pay up, or he would arrest her.<\/p>\n
“Basically, I wasn’t allowed to call my husband or my lawyer about this, and he kept me on the phone and kept engaging me, kept kind of intimidate me,” Scheck said.<\/p>\n
Scheck went into her local Fifth Third Bank in La Porte, Indiana to withdraw the money and drop it off, in-person, to that fake law enforcement agent. But bank employees jumped into action.<\/p>\n
“We follow bank protection rules. If we feel that it is still something that’s a suspicious situation, we pause right there and we don’t give in,” said Crystal Holaway, a customer service representative at Fifth Third.<\/p>\n
Holaway said she noticed Scheck’s transaction was out of the ordinary. Scheck was on the phone with the alleged crooks.<\/p>\n
“She then kind of pointed to a phone that she had in her hands. So that’s one of the things that we look out for are the red flags,” Holaway said.<\/p>\n
Manager Kym Lee also helped to stop the scam.<\/p>\n
“She was in tears; she was really, really frightened,” Lee said. “To talk with the customer and help them to see things from where we are, because a lot of times there is a change in reality, and they feel trapped in the reality that the fraudster has them in.”<\/p>\n
“Bank impersonation scams between 2024-2025 tripled in volume,” said Kris Edwards, Fifth Third head of fraud prevention. “Whether that’s us looking and trying to intervene through a detection perspective as we see transactions coming through on the bank side or asking questions as customers process transactions, that’s really allowing us to get ahead of this.”<\/p>\n
Scheck is grateful for the intervention.<\/p>\n
“Absolutely, I’m grateful that they were they picked up on the cues and the clues from my face and my demeanor,” Scheck said.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement and banks will never call or text you and ask you to move money or withdraw money. If you get a call or text like this, ignore it and report it.<\/p>\n
You can report to local authorities and the FBI.<\/a>
<\/p>\nCopyright \u00a9 2026 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LA PORTE, Ind. (WLS) — Local bank employees stopped a woman from sending $10,000 to scammers. The I-Team…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[318005,1582,276,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-776004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-318005","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-la","12":"tag-los-angeles","13":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116524639456470321","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}