The Habersham County Sheriff’s Office has removed the county jail inmate roster from its website because scammers were using it to “victimize our citizens, (so) we made the decision to deactivate that function on the website, at least temporarily.”
SHERIFF’S OFFICE FACEBOOK POST:
“(Last year) scammers visited the website and viewed those recently arrested, then apparently performed online searches to identify family members. The scammers then contacted numerous families, representing themselves as law enforcement officers, and solicited money from the families.
The thousands of dollars obtained by the scammers from family members, supposedly to get their loved ones out of jail or released on an ankle monitor, then was lost.
Inmates’ families have enough to deal with when their loved one is incarcerated. They don’t need the additional worry of losing their hard-earned money to scammers.
Since removing the inmate roster from the website, we have not had any more instances of inmate families being scammed.
We will continue to provide the arrest summary to The Northeast Georgian, the county’s legal organ, for publication as we work through the process of trying to identify a way to protect inmate families from potential scams.”