The FBI is looking into a spate of bomb threats phoned in to businesses in a dozen states that resulted in employees wiring thousands of dollars overseas.
Since last Thursday, at least 15 threatening phone calls have been made to stores that have wire transfer capabilities, Special Agent Rich Kolko of the FBI said on Wednesday.
The calls follow a similar pattern, with the caller claiming to be "able to see what is going on in the store and asking money be wired," Kolko said.
The first threat that the FBI knows about came in an early morning call on Thursday last week to a Western Union inside a Safeway grocery store in Sandy, Oregon. The caller demanded that money be wired to an account in Portugal, Chief of Police Harold Skelton said, adding that employees called the police instead.
While many of the calls have not resulted in money transfers, a law enforcement official said a total of about US$13,000 has been wired to an overseas account from businesses in Kansas, Missouri and Rhode Island.
A police officer as quoted as saying that money was wired on Tuesday from a Wal-Mart in Newport, Rhode Island -- a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart on Wednesday would neither confirm nor deny that report.
Last Friday, the Nodaway Valley Bank in Savannah, Missouri, received a telephone call just before 9:30am. Chief of Police David Vincent said the caller stated that "he had an accomplice and that they had placed a bomb inside the bank and that if they did not wire the money, he would set off the bomb."
The suspect also demanded a teller's cellphone number.
"Of course, then she was terrified that they would be able to track her down," Vincent said.
The employees then wired just under US$3,000 while the man stayed on the phone, Vincent said. When that transfer, which is just under the amount that requires additional reporting to the government, was successful, he demanded that another be sent. However, when the teller tried to comply, Western Union denied the transfer. The would-be bomber said the teller had to call the company and demand that the transfer go through or he would detonate the explosive. Western Union still denied the transfer.
The director of media relations for Western Union, Sherry Johnson, said the company was aware of the scheme and has been for about a week.
"This is a case of fraud," Johnson said.
Western Union officials believe the same individual who is responsible for this string of threats was responsible for an earlier scam in which he contacted money transfer providers pretending that he worked for Western Union.
"He tried to induce them to send money to say he was testing the system," she said. "When he did not get the results he wanted that is when we believe the additional bomb threat started to occur."
In each of the cases at stores in the past week, officials have found no evidence of a bomb or explosives. On Wednesday, a phone threat to a grocery store in Millinocket, Maine, required the evacuation of 36 people.
Chief of Police Donald Bolduc said: "For this community, it was quite an incident for us."
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