Jury Duty Picture this: you're home on a Saturday morning
after a long week of work.
You'd like nothing more than to relax and decompress for the day.
Suddenly, your phone rings and the caller ID reads, "County Sheriff's Office."
You answer it, and the voice on the other end informs you that you've missed your mandated
jury duty.
To make matters worse, there's a warrant out for your arrest.
You'd probably want a little more information to make sure this was legit, right?
Let's say you ask to speak to the caller's supervisor, and he unexpectedly obliges.
You're transferred to a Police Captain who reiterates that your arrest is imminent unless
you pay a thousand-dollar fine.
What's your next move?
You still suspect it might be a scam, but is a thousand dollars really worth the possibility
of police dragging you from your house in handcuffs?
This was the exact dilemma that a 50-year-old woman named Kaj Miller faced on an otherwise
ordinary Saturday morning in 2015.
She ultimately decided it wasn't worth the risk and ended up sending a $989 MoneyGram
to a person who identified himself as Captain Dwight Garrison of the San Diego County Sheriff's
Office.
Once she sent the wire, Garrison claimed that only some of the money had gone through.
He told Kaj that she'd need to send another wire transfer to make up the difference, or
else she was going to jail.
At that point, Kaj had had enough.
She hung up on "Captain Garrison" and waited out the weekend, anxiously anticipating the
arrival of law enforcement at her doorstep.
That never happened, so she followed up with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department
the following Monday.
It was then that Kaj learned what she feared all along: she'd been scammed.
"Captain Garrison" wasn't actually "Captain Garrison," after all.
The person she'd been talking to—the one who'd pried nearly a thousand dollars from
her—was sitting in a jail cell on the other side of the country.
Jailhouse Scam As it turns out, Kaj had been duped by a pair
of jailhouse scammers.
The first person she'd talked to was Jesse Lopez.
After getting hit with a pair of robbery convictions, Lopez was locked up in Georgia's Autry State
Prison for 10 years.
His cellmate, Joseph Tate - also known as "Captain Dwight Garrison" - was staring down
a 40-year sentence of his own after he'd been caught dealing illegal substances.
What compelled them to start up their scam?
The answer, like most things in life, was money.
As you might have guessed, being incarcerated isn't the most lucrative situation to find
yourself in.
There are very few legal avenues through which inmates can make money, and even the scant
opportunities they do have access to ultimately reap few rewards.
There are prison jobs, which generally involve menial tasks like cooking, cleaning, and laundry.
While an inmate may choose to fill one of these positions just to pass the time, there's
very little money to be made in working a prison job.
In fact, most of them only pay pennies an hour.
As a result, many prisoners rely on the financial support of their family and friends on the
outside.
Even then, some people who find themselves locked up aren't on the best of terms with
their loved ones, so they're not always an available resource, either.
While inmates at correctional facilities receive some money each month, it's nothing to write
home about.
The monthly wage they earn is less than the minimum hourly wage in most states.
Cash is hard to come by in prison.
Due to that financial scarcity, inmates might turn to alternative means of earning their
money.
In most cases, "alternative" means "illegal."
There are far more risks involved in attempting to make money outside the bounds of the law.
But, as Lopez and Tate discovered pretty quickly, it can also result in much higher returns.
23,000 Phones The thing that allowed the two scammers to
operate their con effectively, even as they sat behind bars, was their access to phones.
Smuggled cell phones proved to be the most important tool at their disposal.
It's against the law to have a cell phone in prison.
Therefore, inmates are forced to use a little creativity to get their hands on them.
If you asked Lopez and Tate, though, they'd tell you it wasn't all that hard to get the
cell phones they needed to run their scam.
It was as easy as bribing the guards.
Prison guards don't pull in the big bucks, especially not in Georgia, where they make
between 15 and 20 dollars an hour.
Lopez and Tate had some disposable income, and by throwing some of that extra cash the
guards' way, they got the cellphone hook-up they needed.
From the guard's perspective, turning a blind eye to a smuggled cell phone could net them
a thousand dollars in just one day.
When one considers their meager salaries, it makes sense why bribery proved to be so
effective.
However, not all inmates have the money necessary to get the guards on their side.
For that reason, prisons have seen all sorts of crackpot schemes aimed at sneaking cell
phones inside.
For example, the authorities once intercepted a couch about to be reupholstered by a group
of inmates receiving vocational training.
Inside of the couch, they found a hundred phones that had been carefully hidden underneath
the cushions.
Prisoners aren't shy in their persistent attempts to smuggle in cell phones, which explains
why Georgia prisons reportedly seized a total of 23,000 contraband phones from 2014 to 2015.
That's nearly one cell phone for every other inmate in Georgia's prison system.
Jailhouse Actors Once they had the phones, the guys could operate
their secret scam right from their cell.
They certainly had enough free time.
Lopez was the one who tracked down the individuals they targeted.
His method was simple.
He'd visit an online real estate marketplace like Zillow and looked up houses listed for
millions of dollars.
Then, he cold-called any homeowners in the surrounding neighborhoods.
They targeted wealthy people in well-off areas because, as Lopez believed, it's easier to
get money from people who have money.
They followed a strict script when conducting the scam.
Much like they did with our old friend Kaj Miller, they'd introduce Lopez first.
He posed as the clueless deputy that knew pretty much nothing about the situation.
They hoped their victims would eventually ask to speak to a supervisor.
That's where Tate came in.
He was the sweet-talker, and he knew how to manipulate people into handing over their
money.
Their Dumb Cop/Smart Cop blueprint worked wonders, so they kept it up.
To make the whole thing even more believable, Lopez used a Voice Over Internet Protocol
service to make it look like the caller ID was coming from a local police department.
They also used an app that redirected the call to a call center, where they could utilize
an automated voiceover service to record whatever message they wanted.
When people heard an automated message from the police, their heart rate understandably
increased.
Phone call after phone call, Lopez and Tate successfully convinced people that they had
actually missed jury duty.
Once their victims had bought into the lie that they might get arrested, it wasn't that
hard to get them to pay up.
Duty Laws They probably would have hung up immediately
if the people they called knew about jury duty laws.
The most common consequence for missing jury duty is absolutely nothing.
It's not the best idea to skip out on your court-appointed duty, but the truth is, even
if you did, you probably wouldn't get in a whole lot of trouble.
There are harsher punishments that judges can hand out to people who skip jury duty.
The penalties vary from state to state, and they also depend on how strict the individual
judge chooses to be.
There is a small possibility that you'd be issued a bench warrant.
That means you'd have to appear before a judge.
If that particular judge has other matters to attend to first, you may be taken into
police custody in the meantime.
With that said, you'd know if you'd been summoned for jury duty.
Furthermore, you'd be notified before cops came to drag you away in handcuffs.
In short, don't skip jury duty.
But, if you accidentally miss it, don't wire money to anybody claiming the cops are coming
to arrest you.
The Washer Even so, Lopez and Tate had a way with words,
and they convinced tons of people that the cops were on their way.
Getting people to send the money was only half the battle.
There was still the question of what to do with all the stolen funds.
That's why they recruited the expertise of another fellow inmate named Reginald Perkins.
Not only did Perkins help supply the money that was used to bribe the guards, but he
was also vital in the scammers' effort to launder the money people sent them.
In jailhouse terminology, Perkins was a "washer," and he "washed" the dirty money with the help
of women he befriended on the outside.
He once bragged that he had 100 women across all 50 states under his employ, which wouldn't
be that surprising considering how good he was at laundering money.
Perkins sent the details of any money wire to one of his "girls," who then converted
the payment into 2 or 3 new debit cards.
This practice served multiple purposes: firstly, it distanced the inmates from the fraudulently
obtained money as much as possible.
Secondly, it ensured they could access the funds even if the victim decided to cancel
the payment.
Lopez and Tate could use the money for whatever their heart desired with the debit cards in
hand.
That could mean stuff from the prison store or contraband items like more cell phones.
Either way, Perkins' job was done at that point.
The expert money launderer apparently washed more than $1 million for Lopez and Tate while
operating their scam at Autry.
Miller's Revenge After Kaj Miller had called the police and
learned that she'd fallen victim to the scammers, she filed a detailed criminal complaint against
them.
It took a little convincing on her bank's part, but she finally got her money back.
It seemed like everything was back to normal, and Kaj finally moved on with her life.
Then, the FBI called two years later.
As it turns out, the authorities had been hot on Lopez and Tate's trail for some time.
They'd finally built enough of a case to prosecute them, and they wanted Kaj to testify against
them in court.
She said yes without a moment's hesitation.
As part of their investigation, the FBI planted an informant in Autry State Prison.
His job was to collect the details of the scam discreetly.
While doing so, he supplied Lopez and Tate with debit cards and cash that the FBI used
to support their prosecution.
Reports indicated that he'd even recorded one of their scam phone calls.
They had the scammers dead to rights.
Aftermath 51 people faced criminal charges connected
to the scam, including Lopez, Tate, and Perkins.
The other 48 were guards, inmates, and civilians who'd aided in the money laundering process.
Over the next couple of years, most of those charged pleaded guilty, including the two
masterminds behind the whole thing.
Lopez ultimately testified against those who pleaded not guilty.
He ended up getting just 3 years of probation added to his sentence thanks to his cooperation.
Perkins and Tate were not so lucky.
Perkins had 13 years added to his sentence, and Tate's prison term got a nice extension.
Although prosecutors were happy to smother their scam, their sweeping convictions didn't
scare away copycats.
In 2018, a Georgia inmate was criminally charged for using a smuggled cell phone to pose as
a US Marshal.
He told people they'd missed jury duty and demanded payment from them just like the two
guys who inspired him.
Jailhouse scams aren't exclusive to Georgia, either.
In 2020, for example, prisoners from California stole upwards of $2 billion in pandemic relief
funds from Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.
Just like Lopez and Tate before them, they used contraband phones to communicate with
one another and contact co-conspirators on the outside.
It seems as long as inmates have breath in their lungs and years on their sentence, they'll
do just about anything to game the system that locked them up in the first place.
Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section whether or not people should be in prison for illegal
substance related offenses!