St. Albert RCMP warn of ‘cellphone scam’

A St. Albert woman is warning others to be careful after trouble came knocking on her front door.

“I started getting notifications, it just started blowing up from my camera. The camera was notifying me motion was detected, so I obviously pulled it out, looked at it,” said Kendyl Weir, who was targeted in a cellphone scam.

Weir was away from her home Saturday morning when three people rang her doorbell. Speaking through her security camera, they claimed to have tracked a lost cellphone to the address using an app and demanded to be let inside.

“I said you have 5 seconds to leave my property, or I’m going to call police. She said, ‘Go ahead and call them, and I’ll get into your house and get my phone back. They’ll let me into your house and I’ll get my phone back.’ I called them, saw one of them run up to the front door again, then race back to the vehicle,” Weir explained.

St. Albert RCMP say these encounters are part of what they call “the cellphone scam” seen in the U.S. and eastern Canada, now hitting two St. Albert homes.

Mounties are warning that this is how scammers get access into your home to commit a crime, or get a better idea of what’s inside for the future.

They add, you should close the door and not let anyone in, claiming their phone is inside.

In the two St. Albert cases, Mounties say the homeowners did not let anyone inside, but Weir says the encounter encouraged her to beef up security.

“My sense of security is gone, like completely gone. I don’t know that it’ll come back living in this neighbourhood, to be perfectly honest. We lived here for one year, had a great experience until one random Saturday morning, that’s turned into this complete nightmare,” said Weir.

Police say they are aware of scammers using phone tracking apps or screenshots to try to claim their device is at your home, and to call police if this happens to you.