A Scam I Recently Experienced: If there's one thing everyone hates, it's scams, and in today's world they're more frequent than ever. Your information can now be bought and sold online for less than a candy bar and next thing you know you're getting 5 calls a day from a "Microsoft employee" with a suspiciously foreign accent asking you for your account details. Most people have experienced a scam like that, but I want to talk about a scam that I experienced recently that really caught me off guard because of how well planned it was. During my senior year every student was given an internship to partake in for 1 week, I chose to intern at the court house because of my interest in law and the fact that my Dad worked there as a judge. Now I don't know if it was just perfect timing or something like that but after 2 days of interning at the court house I start getting calls from a hidden number. Now I, like any sane person, just repeatedly declined the calls because I couldn't see the number. Unfortunately though, curiosity got the best of me after the hidden number called for the 4th time. Thinking it could be important, I picked up. To my suprise the man on the phone spoke in an American accent and even more to my suprise he informed me that I had a bench warrant out for me for failing to appear in court and that I needed to pay a fine to get the warrant dropped and avoid being arrested. Maybe it was the fact that I was actively in a court house, but I almost immediately started falling into the trap that the scammer set up. I told him that I would wire "the court house" the fine I needed to pay and be on my way, but luckily before I did that I went to talk to my Dad to see if this was legitimate. I told the scammer I would call him back and hung up. It immediately hit me after I got off the phone with him. I had never been arrested or even had an encunter with the cops in my life, why would I have a bench warrant!? With a clear head I decided to not even ask my Dad about the wire transfer bout of fear of looking like a fool. I did, in fact, not call him back and I never wired him the money, and after calling about 5 more times without an answer he finally gave up. Scams are getting scary, and they're only getting more advanced. In fact my Mom got the exact same phone call not even a month later with the caller claiming the same thing. She also got super stressed out but this time she went to talk to my Dad about it where he cleared things up with her. If there was one thing I could tell people who are frequently involved in these scams is to get a service like Incogni, which goes through the arduos process of removing and keeping your information off of data broking sites.