Police Warn of Terrifying Phone Scam

Imagine answer the phone and hearing someone on the other end screaming at you that if you don't pay them money they are going to harm one of your family members.

According to FOX 5, that's what happened recently to Mindi Stein from Pennsylvania while she was at work.

She told Fox that she received the scam call from a man that said, "I have your daughter and if you don't give me money right away I'm going to kill her." She then said that a girl got on the phone started crying saying, "Mommy, I'm really, really scared and help me, they're throwing me into a van." Then she said, "The man gets back on the phone and says, "Give me money now or I'm going to start chopping off her fingers."

The call came from Mexico and Stein said that the man on the other end of the phone actually knew her daughters name and she said "That really kind of put me over the edge."

How did she figure out this was a scam? Her daughter was home sick from school the day of the phone call, she said that, "It just freaked me out. If my daughter was at school today I would have been petrified because it was a little girl screaming and crying in the background."

She did report the call to local police and wants us to beware of calls like this.