An Uber arrived to take a Sun City woman to the bank. Then she lost thousands
An 87-year-old woman from Sun City Hilton Head lost thousands of dollars after a group of scammers sent an Uber to her driveway and ferried her to a local bank under false pretenses.
It was a rare, in-person variant of a commonly reported scam tactic where criminals imitate public officials and demand targets send “bond money” to evade a fabricated punishment. Local scams drain millions of dollars from Beaufort County residents’ wallets every year, fueled increasingly by fraudulent cryptocurrency payments made through Bitcoin ATMs and similar machines.
The resident of Sun City’s Basket Walk neighborhood told police she first received a call from the scammers on April 4. Claiming they were from the “public defender’s office,” the caller said the woman’s relative had been in a car accident and she needed to pay a cash bond to “secure his release.”
The scammer then put her “relative” on the phone to corroborate their story, according to an incident report from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office. The woman later told police she “did not recognize” the voice of her alleged family member but continued anyway.
That afternoon, just as the caller described, an Uber arrived at the woman’s house and drove her to her local bank, where she withdrew a stack of cash for the so-called bail payment before being driven home.
Following the scammer’s instructions further, the woman then loosely slotted the bills into the pages of a magazine, placed the magazine in a manila envelope and wrapped the envelope in a T-shirt, the police report said. She handed that T-shirt to a nameless female driver who came by her home around 5 p.m. the same evening.
Two days later, the woman told police, she got a call from the same number. The phony public defender confirmed they had received her payment but added another layer to the car accident fib, saying a pregnant woman’s baby had been killed in the car accident her relative was involved in. The caller reportedly asked for another sum of money to have the family “drop the case.” The 87-year-old called police to ask for help.
Beaufort County investigators were still looking through Sun City’s surveillance video to learn the identity of the money courier and how she got behind the gates, according to Lt. Eric Calendine, who specializes in scam and fraud investigations at the Sheriff’s Office. All visitors to the 55-plus gated community are required to have a pass called in by a resident.
Authorities near Orlando, Florida, reported a similar scam last May. The 86-year-old target was reportedly stopped by her concerned son-in-law before she entered the Uber that had appeared outside her house.
Con artists become ‘couriers’
The vast majority of scams targeting residents in the Hilton Head area are operated online, Calendine said, but in-person tactics like this pop up about once a year.
“It’s just crazy that we now have ... almost couriers, who every once and a while show up and get money from our victims,” he said.
While the tactic might seem unconvincing or overly complicated, Calendine said in-person interaction can sometimes increase targets’ trust in a scammer compared to tactics over the internet.
“Instead of putting the money into a crypto ATM, someone’s gonna come by and collect (money) from you and give you a receipt or a file folder, whatever it is,” Calendine said. “It sounds more convincing, and it may be that people are more apt to do that versus putting money into a machine they don’t know anything about.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2025 at 3:15 PM.
