Part of my advocacy is using challenging experiences I have had to help others, which is why I’m sharing this blog with you.

I received a voice message on my business phone on July 17 from “Officer John Johnson” calling from the Marietta Police Department and saying that he needed to talk with me about a legal matter. Here’s the transcript and a recording of his voice message:

“This is a message for Shala Nicely. This is Officer John Johnson down here at the Marietta Police Department. I’m calling in regards to a few legal matters. If you could contact me on my direct line, my number is 770-336-7314. Again, that’s 770-336-7314. This will require immediate attention.”

 

Being a law abiding citizen, I called him back and left a message. He returned my call, and I was then held hostage on the phone for hours and lost a fair amount money in the process.

Let me tell you what happened so that it won’t happen to you.

The keys to this “there’s an arrest warrant out for you” scam

The criminal told me that I had failed to appear in court yesterday, and that a summons had been sent to my business and someone (supposedly me) had signed for it on June 10. He asked why I failed to appear. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He then went into what sounded like a lengthy explanation of how I was in contempt of court and there were civil and criminal warrants out for my arrest as a result. Which, of course, sent my fight or flight or freeze (FFF) response into panic mode.

Here are the keys to how this scam worked:

  • The criminals invoke a paralyzing degree of fear: As I’ve written about previously, once your FFF response is activated, your prefrontal cortex goes offline. Meaning you can’t think clearly so you can’t process rationally what the criminal is saying because you feel under threat. I even Googled “scam that there’s a warrant out for my arrest for missing a court date” at the beginning of the call and found the following but couldn’t process it enough to hang up the phone.

  • They did their research: They targeted me without a doubt. They had clearly been stalking me on my website, so they knew I was a therapist, they knew that therapists can get subpoenaed to go to court, and they probably also knew I had a history of OCD and PTSD, which would make me more likely to feel this was threatening and follow the instructions of “law enforcement.”
  • They use client confidentiality to their advantage. They told me that due to confidentiality, they couldn’t tell me who the case was for (for the court appearance I supposedly missed), but that it had to do with child sexual abuse, and that the case could be with a past client who was a child or involving one of their parents.
  • They overload with you with frightening information, compounding the fear and “authenticity” of their story. This includes the judge’s name, the name of his direct supervisor in the police department, the case numbers on the warrants out for your arrest, and all sorts of legal jargon thrown at you with the speed of a tennis ball launcher. And I was looking stuff up while he was talking, and was finding the names he provided to be actual people. He told me my new court date where I was to testify in this case and if I followed his instructions and got a surety bond posted, I could appear for that court date and then get my money back (more on this below). By the way, he was even impersonating a real police officer, but one who works from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. (which I only found out later…keep reading…)
  • They spoof the Police Department’s phone number so that the call looks legitimate: see the screen shot.
  • They isolate you from help: I asked at one point if I could call my father or my attorney for assistance. He said I could not, because if I did, then those people would be breaking the “gag order” and all of us would be prosecuted. They tell you all your communication is being monitored by the National Crime Information Center and so you cannot send texts or emails either.
  • They are emotionally abusive and manipulative. I told him that I’d just come to the police station right now and sort this out, but he said that I couldn’t do that because they would have to arrest me on sight because of the warrants. He told me he was here to help me. He vacillated from being kind and compassionate to yelling at me and threatening to send cops over to arrest me right now when I was hesitating. At one point, when I was sobbing and feeling like I might actually pass out from anxiety because I felt like I was being held hostage and couldn’t think clearly about what to do, he started yelling at me at the top of his voice and telling me he’d had it with me and was just going to turn me over to be arrested on criminal charges, and they would be there to pick me up shortly. I kid you not, I begged him to keep working with me, to help me figure this out.
  • These people are savvy professionals, so if all this is sounding crazy to you, it is, and if you’re questioning my intelligence and wondering how in the world I fell for this, I don’t blame you. But again, they know what they are doing.
  • They hold you hostage, and I mean that literally, and they won’t let you go until you pay the ransom. According to my online sleuthing since this happened, the crimes that can be aspects of this scam may include extortion, impersonating a police officer, and theft (and probably others). Being on the receiving end of all this is traumatizing, because I felt like I had a gun pressed to my temple the entire time as he continued to employ:
    • Threats and intimidation: He told me I could not hang up the phone or lose the connection with him. He was reminding me repeatedly that there were active arrest warrants out for me and if I didn’t do what he said, the cops were going to arrest me. He told me to get into my car and drive to an ATM and get money out to post for my surety bond, and that as soon as it was posted, I would get half back later today and the other half back at my court date. He stayed on the phone with me his whole time and told me to drive the speed limit so I wouldn’t get picked up for speeding and then arrested due to having open warrants. He told me to go to an Office Depot or Office Max and put the cash I had withdrawn on MoneyPak cards. The whole time I was in the Office Depot I wanted to grab the hands of the women who were helping me and somehow communicate that I thought I was being held hostage right before their eyes, but I was too scared to do so. He had repeated multiple times to not mention why I was doing this to anyone (because I’m sure he was afraid it would tip someone off to stop me) because that would mean violating the “gag order” and further escalating the charges against me.
    • Impersonating someone who was “on my side”: I bought the cards, I loaded them with money, I gave him the numbers as he requested to “post the surety bond” while (I know now) that he was on the back end using those numbers to take the money from the cards. He even gave me “verification numbers” and had me put the cards in an envelope and mail them to an official government address so that I wouldn’t have access to them anymore, and to give him the code on the USPS mailbox for “verification.” He then kept me on the phone, telling me he was working on getting the arrest warrants “frozen” so I could then come into the police station and do a signature verification, so they could compare my signature with the signature of the person who supposedly signed the subpeona/summons, as they were going to “open an investigation” into that for me.
    • Escalating and violently cruel emotional manipulation to ratchet up the fear: Just before the end of this nightmare, he told me that he was getting an error in trying to process the “surety bond,” and unfortunately the judge wasn’t going to drop one of the warrants, and that he would do everything he could for me but I might get taken into custody. I had been crying on and off during this whole process due my spidey sense telling me that something wasn’t right about this, which was competing with my OCD and PTSD, both of which just wanted to keep me safe. Then the call dropped, and I had been told that I couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t get help, and I was going to be spending the night in jail if I showed up at the police station. I tried to call him back, he didn’t pick up. I called the Marietta Police Department (which is one of the numbers he had spoofed during this process) in a complete panic and asked for that officer, which is when I found out that he worked the night shift, was currently out of the office, that there were no warrants out for my arrest, and that I had been scammed.

As I write this, I feel a bit like I’m going to pass out and/or throw up because it seems like such an obvious scam and how could I have fallen for it? But again, my brain wasn’t working correctly. I was in a full PTSD episode, my worst nightmares coming to fruition.

Here’s how we get back at the criminals

I have been a busy little beaver since the moment that call dropped. I did go to the Marietta Police Department and the Cobb County Sheriff’s office in person and filed a police report. When I saw an actual sherif’s deputy, I had to restrain myself from enveloping him in a hug, I was so relieved to see a real officer of the law. I called my family, and then went to a neighbor’s house for support and a hug. Within an hour, I knew that the next step was to write this blog while the experience was fresh on my mind. And in fewer than 24 hours since this happened, this post been distributed to thousands of people through my network and the networks of my colleagues and friends, and the reach will just keep growing.

The more this blog spreads, the more I’ve been hearing from people who have also been a victim of this scam. So if it’s happened to you, know you are absolutely not alone. Criminals hope we will be ashamed and not tell anyone about what happened (more abusive emotional manipulation) so that their future targets will be in the dark about this scam. But there’s nothing to be ashamed about. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like if someone had broken into my house and held a gun to my head—I would have likely done whatever the guy had said, and it would have been the best I could have done at the time.

Shame festers in silence. I refuse to be silent. I shared my story with my contacts in the press, I reported the crime to the FBI, and I will continue to share what happened with everyone I know. Yes, I got scammed, but if I can let people know the details of what happened, I will be making his job much harder in the future, and hopefully protecting others from being traumatized.

So let’s get the word out to everyone about this scam. If you’re a therapist, share this blog with your colleagues. Post it to message boards and social media groups. If you’re a person with OCD and you have a therapist, send this blog post to them, and ask them to pass it along. If you’re an attorney, please share with your clients that this isn’t how the law works. In fact, please share this blog post with everyone you know, even people who aren’t therapists, as I’m sure there are versions of this scam affecting people in other industries.

And yes, I have moments of feeling silly admitting that I was conned (and may have what Brené Brown calls a vulnerability hangover at some point for having written this and shared how I had the wool pulled over my eyes), but I’m committed to use what happened to me for good. If I can keep even one more person, one more therapist from having this happen to them, then my terror and suffering from this experience has meaning.

I’m becoming anti-fragile, and you can, too.

Was I traumatized by this? Absolutely. Am I going to let it tank my PTSD or OCD recoveries? Hell no.

All of us who have PTSD and/or OCD and have fought to regain our lives are strong. And I’m determined to use this adversity to make me even STRONGER. If you’re resilient, that means you bounce back to where you were. But I’m going to use every evidence-based PTSD therapy skill I’ve ever learned to bounce back and be BETTER than I was before. I’m going to use this traumatic experience to become anti-fragile. To see the world as a good place. Yes, there are bad people out there, and yes, they can take advantage of good decent people like you and me. But I will sleep well tonight knowing that I did the best I could as a person with PTSD in an extremely triggering situation. I will have compassion for myself. I will not call myself names. I will forgive myself for being human and making a mistake because I was trying to do the right thing.

And I will embrace this turning point in my recovery, where I’m experiencing post-traumatic growth instead of post-traumatic stress. To learn more, please see “A new response to trauma and PTOCD,” which is the presentation I gave at the IOCDF conference a week after the scam occurred.

Forgiveness is for me, for us

And here’s the other extremely important thing I have done for myself: I forgave the criminal. It must be really hard to be in a place where through your circumstances or your beliefs you imagine the only options open to you to support yourself are to hurt others. He has my money now, and I hope he uses it to support his family. To buy his kids something nice. Even better, to get himself out of the life he’s living: a life of fraud, a life of dishonesty, a life of crime. And while the fraud he’s currently committing makes him very hard for the police to trace and apprehend, I’m guessing eventually all this will catch up with him in some way.

But I believe that everyone deserves a second chance, even those who hurt us. Even him. And I wish him well, because that definitely helps me, and perhaps it will even help him. While I will continue to advocate to get the word out about this crime and help others, I’m not doing it with a sense of vengeance but instead with a sense of empowerment because holding a grudge against someone who has hurt us only allows them to hurt us further.

And please know that if you’ve been traumatized by one of these scams and you can’t even comprehend being able to forgive your assailant, that’s okay. I’ve done quite a bit of personal work on forgiveness in the past few years, and that groundwork allowed me to forgive the perpetrator much more quickly and easily than I would have been able to in the past. Forgiveness is a process, one that can be lengthy, and working with a skilled therapist can help you navigate the path to recovery and whatever part forgiveness might play in that journey.

If you’d like to learn more about forgiveness, please see Dr. Fred Luskin’s Forgive for Good or Thích Nhất Hạnh’s essays in Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, where he discusses his forgiveness toward the people who exiled him from his own country for decades because of his opposition to war. For more information about how holding grievances can change our culture, society, and our views of each other, see “Grievance Nation: How Our Obsession with Victimhood Warps Our Culture” by Frank Bruni.

P.S. Oh, by the way, thank you!

I have written one murder mystery novel (to be published), but what I just went through will definitely make it into my next novel. Maybe I will be able to describe the experience as part of the story so vividly and so well that the book will become a New York Times bestseller. And if that comes to pass, I’ll hold onto the knowledge that that wouldn’t have happened had I not had this heart-pounding experience. Maybe I will turn the money this guy took from me into an absolutely mind-blowing windfall of book royalties as well as another opportunity to become anti-fragile.

Most importantly, I’m going to see this experience as another example of practicing my New Rule #1 that I wrote about in my memoir, “Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life”:

I can’t judge any of this as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

I’m going to allow for bigger plans than my own to unfold.

Life is a classroom and I’m here to learn.

For further information

To learn more about how these types of scammers use psychological warfare to incrementally alter your sense of reality I highly recommend reading “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam,” by , the Cut’s financial-advice columnist.

You can also learn more about how scams are taking place electronically in the following articles:

If you have been or think you’ve been the victim of fraud, the United States Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft website is a great resource.

To learn more about the dynamic combination of OCD and PTSD and how it’s treated, see “Post-traumatic OCD: When OCD & PTSD Intertwine.”  If you’re a therapist and would like to learn more about how to treat co-occurring OCD and PTSD, you can take Dr. Pinciotti’s on-demand CEU course on The Knowledge Tree: Trauma-Related OCD: Exposure Therapy for Co-Occurring OCD and PTSD – 3 CEUs.

Learn more about taming OCD and reclaiming your life

To learn more about how I used ERP and self-compassion to become anti-fragile, see Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life. Click here to purchase your copy.

Sign up for my Shoulders Back! newsletter to receive OCD-taming tips & resources, including notifications of new blog posts, delivered every month to your inbox.

My blog posts are not a replacement for therapy, and I encourage all readers who have obsessive compulsive disorder to find a competent ERP therapist. See the IOCDF treatment provider database for a provider near you. And never give up hope, because you can tame OCD and reclaim your life!