SCAMS:

The cases are varied, but the lessons are the same.

Every day across the U.S., people are scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one really knows how much money is lost to scammers because many shell games go unreported.

The numbers are so vast that the Department of Justice can’t keep track, said Kevin Sonoff at the U.S. Department of Justice in Portland. But according to Consumer Reports, a nonprofit watchdog, Americans lose over $7 billion annually to scams.

Scot Graf at the Idaho Attorney General’s office doesn’t know the exact impact of scams in Idaho, either, but he has an idea it’s substantial.

“They are a tough problem to pin down,” Graf said.

He spends considerable time writing news releases warning of the latest scams.

Scams usually follow the same pattern, Graf said. Scammers use social media, or the telephone often to instill fear, and turn it into cash.

Idahoans may lose as much as $3.5 million annually to scammers, according to the attorney general’s office, which receives as many as 5,000 fraud complaints per year.

Coeur d’Alene residents are not exempt, and scammers don’t disqualify anyone, not even cops.

Capt. Dan Soumas at the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office gets a call a day on his cell phone from swindlers wanting to lighten his bank account.

“Any more I let them go to voice mail,” Soumas said.

He has gotten calls from people pretending to be IRS agents and from putative collectors at the Bank of America — never mind that he doesn’t bank there. Just the other day, Soumas received a robo-call from a Seattle number assuring him he was selected to receive a grant. He didn’t call back.

“If you call the number back, typically a live (person) will answer,” Soumas said. “After they explain your good fortune you will be asked to send some money for a processing fee or something like that. “

He knows the process by rote. That’s how scams work, Soumas said.

“The grant, of course, will be worth much more than the amount you will be asked to send,” Soumas said.

In the end, a victim will have paid money for nothing, and often there is no trace for police to follow.

How many scams target North Idaho residents?

Let me count the ways, Soumas said.

In a frequently reported IRS scam, a caller tells the target they owe money and will be arrested if they do not pay. A jury scam instills fear by telling a target they have missed jury duty and therefore owe the court, or a law enforcement department, a penalty. If they do not pay up now, a warrant will be issued for their arrest and they’ll go to jail. In bank scams, callers ask people to confirm their debit card numbers, Social Security numbers and account numbers, so they can be updated ­— or something similar — and the hustlers then drain the target’s bank account.

There are sweepstakes scams, private donation scams, fake eBay scams and utility company scams in which targets are told they owe money, or else.

The one that bugs Soumas the most is when scammers call Kootenai County residents alleging they are from the sheriff’s office and ask for money.

In that scam, swindlers use a technique called spoofing. Spoofing allows a caller to have a telephone number — any number of their choosing — show up on the target’s caller ID.

Someone alleging to be a deputy or detective asks for cash. They may say they are collecting on a phony citation, a warrant, or that they are seeking donations.

“It’s easy to look at that and fall for it,” Soumas said.

Debra Christy of Coeur d’Alene fell for it. She shared details about just such an elaborate scam, where her 91-year-old mother was targeted.

Christy’s mom received an afternoon call from a man claiming to be KCSO Capt. Andy Boyle, saying she missed a summons for a grand jury appearance and she had to go to the department at once to explain.

When Christy took the phone, the man demanded she bring her mom in or she would be served with a bench warrant for not cooperating. She was given a phony phone number to the “Department of Justice,” where another scammer claimed to be a federal prosecutor who said he had footage of officers putting a court summons in her mom’s mailbox. Christy argued with the man about never receiving it. He said he would speak with “Boyle” again and hung up.

When he called back, “Boyle” was also on the line. The men orchestrated arguments with each other and kept Christy on the phone for over an hour. With the threat of her mom being jailed and the use of real names and believable phone numbers, Christy eventually went to Walmart to wire $1,500 of the $2,000 “bail.” She was told she would be called back the next morning.

“When the call never came in, I called (the real) Capt. Boyle and he said he never spoke with me and that I had been scammed,” Christy reported. “This was a very elaborate and sophisticated thing. I am aware of scams, but these people had the right names, right addresses for the courts, everything. And I fell hard. The flags I ignored: Texas accents, Mountain Home caller ID, multiple conference calls with a prosecutor.”

These scammers threatened and harassed Christy and her mom through the duration of the incident. Christy filed a report with the Internet Crime Complaint Center but she doubts the money will ever be returned.

“They’re going after the elderly because they can scare the s**t out of them. That’s my opinion,” Christy said. “If you get in trouble with the police or sheriff’s office, they will never call you. They’ll come to your door. If they’re calling you, it’s not real.”

Soumas reminds people that his department doesn’t call residents seeking cash.

“No one should be calling them on the phone and demanding them to pay money,” he said. “It’s called extortion if they intimidate you to get your money.”

In a Post Falls case, a man lost $40,000 to Internet scammers pretending to be from a computer company that required the victim’s computer be updated online. They were given access to his computer and stole banking information.

Police say it is difficult, if not impossible, for local law enforcement to locate the swindlers and file charges.

“Most of the time they are on the East Coast, or the calls come from out of the country,” Detective Jared Reneau of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department said.

Coeur d’Alene officers do not have jurisdiction, and follow-ups often result in the cases going cold.

“It’s a challenge if you don’t have the resources or the jurisdiction,” Reneau said.

His department refers fraudulent telemarketing or Internet cases to the FBI and FCC, and victims can themselves contact those departments to render complaints.

In many scams callers target people over 60 years old because that age group often isn’t as sophisticated with the latest technology, and they tend to believe people because they were raised to believe a person is only as good as their word.

“I think we see those fairly frequently,” Reneau said.

The silver lining, said Graf, is that reporting scams does not go unrewarded. People may not get back the cash they lost, but it’s good to know that at least on occasion arrests are made. He points to a recent case in India where more than 60 people were arrested when police raided nine call centers, one of the epicenters of scam calls to U.S. consumers.

“These people operate with a cloak of anonymity, and it’s hard for law enforcement to catch up to them,” Graf said.

This case is an example that “they can get busted,” Graf said.

Staff writer Devin Heilman contributed to this story.