![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Lakeland-Police-Chief-Sam-Taylor-1.jpg\")
\u201cNo law enforcement agency will ever call you and ask you for money,\u201d said Lakeland Police Chief Sam Taylor. \u201cAny sort of a cash app or PayPal or anything like that. That\u2019s not the way it\u2019s done so please, do not ever send anybody who claims to be the police department or city money over any sort of social media.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dozens of people have called police and said a \u201cJosh Lewis\u201d is contacting them, claiming to be the interim police chief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hustler says there is a warrant out for the victim\u2019s arrest and they can pay money to get rid of the warrant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what they\u2019re looking for is folks they can convince to give them the money,\u201d said Chief Taylor. \u201cAnd I\u2019m quite sure that the folks they can convince to give them money probably don\u2019t have the means to afford whatever money they can give them. That\u2019s the sad part about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Pope, who lives in Lakeland and encounters fraud victims often in her job in retail, said a scheme like this would be obvious to her since law enforcement does not serve warrants this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey would literally come and serve you the papers or you could do your due diligence and look it up online,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyone who is suspicious of any call, email or text message should immediately call law enforcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lakeland police can be reached at 863-834-6900.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A thief is pretending to be Lakeland\u2019s top cop, threatening to arrest people if they don\u2019t fork over money. The real police chief says it would never happen that way.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[4471],"class_list":["post-29827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","category-news","tag-real-lakeland-police-chief-warns-about-fake-police-chief-scheme"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}