The Police Department has fielded many calls related to telephone fraud recently, according to Police Chief Joseph Roark.

“The common thread of all the complaints is an attempt by the caller to obtain personal information from the citizens,” said Roark in a press release. “This type of scam is very common and referred to as ‘pre-texting’ in law enforcement. The criminals lie on the telephone to get your personal information.”

In such cases, the scammer may call and lie to the resident about who they are and whom they work for, saying they are with a particular bank or another legitimate company to get the resident to divulge their personal information by saying there is a problem with an account.

Some even pose as representatives from government agencies and ask the resident to confirm their billing information. In these ways, the scammers obtain Social Security numbers and other types of personal information to commit any number of identity fraud crimes, including unauthorized charges on existing credit cards, opening new credit cards or bank accounts, writing fake checks and taking out loans.

But scams are not just limited to phone calls, Pelham police Lt. Gary Fisher pointed out.

“A lot of it is done over the Internet,” he said.

A Contoocook woman was recently duped when she received an e-mail saying Yahoo. com wanted to confirm her personal information for her account. Pam Manus did not respond with her account information, but did send a reply asking why Yahoo wanted the information.

When she sent the e-mail, she saw that it did not go to Yahoo, but to a different email address. Just by doing that, Manus set off a chain reaction in which an e-mail was sent to all of the people in her address book saying she’d been robbed in Michigan, and requested they wire money to her.

The Pelham police have a case now in which a man was being asked via e-mail to give money for a cause and found out it was going overseas.

Both telephone and email scams should be reported to police, Fisher said, as a security in a person’s eventual dealings with their credit company or bank. All such incidents should also be reported to the Federal Trade Commission and to your credit company immediately.

“If (residents) report them to us, usually police agencies can work with the banks to try and find out where (the scam originated),” Fisher said.

If there is no return number or e-mail address, the culprits can be very hard to track, Fisher said.

If residents do not recognize the e-mail address, can’t get a caller to give them a return number or especially if they haven’t done business with the agency being represented lately, no personal information should be given out, Fisher said.

Those who suspect they’ve been scammed should close their accounts immediately and place fraud alerts on their credit reports, police said.

For more information on identity theft, visit www.ftc. gov/idtheft or call (877) IDTHEFT. To find out more about the most common phone scams, visit www.ftc.gov/bcp/ edu/microsites/phonefraud/ index.shtml.