Gainesville police say calls demanding money to avoid arrest are a scam

Gainesville Police say anyone who gets a phone call or an email demanding money to keep them out of jail is being targeted by a scam. In a warning posted to the city website on Jan. 18, 2025, the department said people posing as law officers were making contact by telephone and email and asking for payment to head off an arrest. Law enforcement agencies do not take money by phone or email to settle criminal charges, the department said, and anyone who receives that kind of demand should report it to police.

The scheme came with paperwork. The alert described documents sent to a victim, one of them displaying the badge of the Cooke County Sheriff's Office, which gave the payment demand the appearance of official business.

The Federal Trade Commission warns that police impersonators can falsify caller ID and use a real officer's name, and advises hanging up and contacting the agency on a number known to be authentic. Gainesville Police list the department number on the city website as 940-668-7777.

The department's January warning does not establish that a caller posed as a police captain.

The tactic is familiar across North Texas. Denton County tells residents that callers pose as sheriff's sergeants and lieutenants, sometimes as district judges, borrow genuine names and ranks, and press for immediate payment over jury duty someone supposedly missed. The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office has warned about callers who claim to be its own personnel and invent missed jury service, unpaid fines or other crimes that never happened.

Farther west, the Tom Green County Sheriff's Office reported on June 7, 2024 that impersonation calls had cost people thousands of dollars. Callers in those cases recited real officials' names, badge numbers and the addresses of judicial offices to sound credible, the sheriff's office said.

Losses among older adults have been climbing, according to the FTC. Reports from people 60 and older who lost at least $10,000 to business or government impersonators rose more than fourfold between 2020 and 2024, the agency said. Among older adults who reported losing more than $100,000, combined losses went from $55 million to $445 million. Of the older adults who reported losing at least $10,000 in 2024, 41% said the contact started with a telephone call.

The national count keeps climbing too. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than twice as many government-impersonation complaints in 2025 as it did in 2023, with reported losses for the year of roughly $800 million. That category covers impersonation of government broadly rather than local police alone, and the totals are national, not counts for Gainesville or Cooke County.

For anyone already out money, the FBI advises saving the messages and transaction records and calling the bank to protect accounts, then filing a complaint with IC3.