Truro realtor rejects scam attempt, so scammer 'swats' her house. Now she's getting death threats

A disappointed phone scammer targeting a Truro realtor called a large-scale police response to her door. The scammer told police there was a hostage and people had shot at the house.

And it didn’t end there.

“The part I don’t get is, like, I wasn’t rude to the woman on the phone. I was never rude to her. I’m talking to her just like talking to you now,” said Lynn Colpitts in an interview Saturday.

“I don’t understand why she took it to such an extreme.”

It started with a phone call Friday at about 9:30 a.m. Working in real estate, Colpitts needs to answer the phone even if it’s an unfamiliar number.

A woman said she was with the CIBC fraud department and that at 2 a.m. that day, someone had applied for a Canadian Tire credit card and was approved using her personal information. The woman had Colpitts’s address, phone number and last four digits of her credit card.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to disclose to you any of my personal information.’ I mean, I knew I was smart enough not to do that but, anyway, she said, ‘No, that’s fine.’ She said, ‘I have everything that I need here.’”

The woman told Colpitts to cancel her credit card and download the “CIBC Guard” app. Colpitts said she wasn’t comfortable with that and asked to include “my IT guy” on the call.

“He asked her a couple questions, and she kind of hesitated. One was her physical address. She said, ‘Well, like, for privacy reasons, I can’t give you that.’”

Her co-worker advised Colpitts to call her bank to ask if she should download the app and then hung up.

“I said, ‘I’m going to call my adviser at the bank and ask him if it’s OK to download this app,’ and the next thing she says, she starts swearing at me. She said, ‘You f—ing bitch,’ and hung up on me.”

About 20 minutes later, Colpitts’s phone rang again.

“She calls me back, and she goes, ‘I just need you to go outside. There’s a surprise for you out there,’ and I said, ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ She goes, ‘Outside.’ She goes, ‘Go outside now. There’s a big surprise for you out there.’ And she said, ‘It’s especially for you.’”

On edge, Colpitts said, she looked out her kitchen window. RCMP and Truro police vehicles and officers were everywhere.

“I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ And she goes, ‘You like my surprise?’ She goes, ‘There’s more to come. This is just the start.’”

Colpitts went out to her front porch, where a police officer yelled at her, asking her to identify herself.

The woman was still on the phone.

“It was very terrifying, like, the whole thing,” Colpitts said.

Police told her that they got a call from a woman identifying herself as Colpitts, saying she was barricaded in the bathroom “and that there were people shot in the house and that, you know, there was blood coming underneath the door and there were still people in the house with guns.”

Police quickly cleared the scene.

“She kept calling my phone. Like, she would hang up and call back . . . and then every time she did it, she was threatening more and more. But, you know, it’s the emails that I’m getting (that) scare the crap out of me because it tells me I’m gonna die today. Like, I got bombs in my house. . . . It’s bizarre.”

The emails are coming from alarming addresses like boom.isis.death and the KKK, Colpitts said. She said later Saturday that her brokerage web page was hacked and her picture was changed to a deformed animal. The photo has been taken down.

In a news release Monday, Colchester County District RCMP said they were called to a Lower Truro home at about 9:45 a.m. Friday.

“Colchester County District RCMP received information from Truro Police Service that a woman had reported being held hostage by three armed individuals at a residence on Tideview Drvie,” RCMP said.

RCMP confirmed Colpitts had received a scam call and that they’re investigating.

“This incident highlights how far scammers are willing to go when their schemes are challenged,” says Staff Sgt. Marc Rose with the Colchester County District RCMP. 

“By falsely reporting an armed hostage situation, they caused a significant deployment of police resources for an event that never occurred.  We commend the victim for taking the time to verify the information she received and encourage others to do the same when contacted about suspected fraud.”  

“RCMP told me this never happened before with them, swatting, it’s not normal here,” Colpitts said.

Swatting is a term for false calls requiring a large police presence. While it may be a first for Truro, it has happened several times in Halifax recently.

It’s been hard to sleep, Colpitts said, and she’s left wondering how the scammer got so much of her information.

She posted about her experience on Facebook because she wants others to be aware.

“People call me and say, ‘Is this real?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it really did happen.’ Like, it’s real,” she said.

“I do want the word out there because I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”

The RCMP are directing anyone with information to contact Nova Scotia Crime Stoppers, at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) and say information about protection from common frauds can be found at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre website.