HARPSWELL — The Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Office warns Mainers of a telephone scam targeting grandparents.

Last week, a Harpswell man fell into the trap when a call from a man posing as an officer at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti said that the Harpswell man’s grandson was in trouble. The caller identified the man’s grandson by name.

Then, a voice that sounded like his grandson came on the phone to plead for help.

“It didn’t make sense, but we were scared to death and so we tried to do what we thought we had to do,” the man said in a phone interview Monday.

According to the sheriff ’s office, the man wired $7,000 to the suspects in Haiti.

The man said callers told him that his grandson was on a group mission to help build a school in Haiti and had hitched a ride with someone.

Callers told the man that someone in that car was transporting drugs and his grandson was arrested in connection with the discovery of those drugs.

The scammers then told the grandparents that funds were needed to get their grandson a legal hearing and that if a legal hearing was not secured, the grandson could be in serious trouble.

“We were scared to death for him and it just frightened us,” the man said. “It would be just the kind of thing that our grandson would do — be with a group that would help others.”

The scammers stressed the urgency of the situation to the grandparents and gave them a bogus number to reach the U. S. Embassy in Haiti.

The Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Office indicated one other such incident has been reported to them recently from grandparents in Gray. In that instance, callers told a woman that her grandson had been involved in a car accident in Madrid.

That woman wired nearly $2,500 to the scammers, the sheriff ’s office reported. Most often, the scammers request that money be sent through wire services such as Western Union or MoneyGram and they are then picked up using fake IDs, “making the case nearly impossible to solve,” a sheriff ’s office press release states.

By the time the Harpswell man contacted other family members, he said, it was too late.

Police urge people to take caution when receiving any similar calls and that they make sure to check with family members to confirm the whereabouts of any reportedly stranded loved ones before sending money.

For information on other scams known to the Office of the Maine Attorney General, visit www.maine.gov/ag/consumer/scams.shtml.

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