Some Hobokenites Receive Scam Extortion Calls, Threats Against Family Members

At least three Hobokenites have been the subject of scam phone calls in which the caller demands money and threatens to hurt family members, police said.

The first such incident was reported on September 10, when a 50-year-old Hoboken woman on Thirteenth Street spoke to a man who called her from an 787-number. 

"You got a son called Jacob," the man told the woman. The caller continued that the son had been in a car accident, police said. 

"Look your son Jacob, we saw him and he wants to bad mouth us? Got out of the car and hit him, threw him in the car and got him in the projects at gun point," the caller told the woman. "He owes us a lot of money." 

The woman did have a son by that name, a 15-year-old who was at school at the time. The same caller made multiple more calls to the woman, but those weren't answered, police said. 

The latest report of such a call came in around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, from that same 787-number. A 70-year-old woman picked up the phone and the caller told her his "fugitive cousins from Puerto Rico" had kidnapped the woman's son, police said. The man on the phone, according to police, told the woman she would have to pay $1,000. 

When the woman asked the caller what her son's name was, the man on the other end of the line answered "no no no, we can't talk about that," according to the police report on the matter. 

The man told the woman—who was on Fourteenth Street at the time of the call—to go to the bank, or they would "kill her son with a bat," according to the report.  

After the woman hung up the phone, she made sure both her sons were safe. 

Police said that anybody who receives a similar phone call should report it immediately. Every call, police said, will be taken seriously until it's definite that it is in fact part of the scam.