Pastor Michael Hargraves signs his emails with "May God Richly Bless You."
He's recently been preaching about sermons about Christian growth and thankfulness for his small congregation at Buffalo United Methodist Church, located on Pine Street in Buffalo, the Dallas County seat.
But along with messages of faith, Hargraves has another message for the public: His church is not linked to phone messages from scammers that have been circulating lately.
Hargraves and church staff have been dealing with reports of scammers using the church's phone number to contact community members, he told the News-Leader in recent days.
How does the phone scam work?
The scam uses the church's local phone number to prompt unsuspecting potential victims to answer a call or listen to voicemails, said Stephanie Garland with the Springfield Better Business Bureau office. Phone users see the church's phone number come up on their device's caller ID, rather than a strange out-of-state number or a toll-free line.
But the church isn't making the call. Instead, fraudsters tell those who pick up the phone that there's an "arrest warrant" with their name on it. The scammers assert that by paying a fine, they can make the purported legal trouble go away.
"What they'll usually do is make it look like a local number and then people will give their information, and credit card information or whatever, to pay their fine and stuff, and then it's done," Hargraves said.
Since scammers began appropriating the......
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