July 16, 2014 / Modified jul 30, 2014 1:24 p.m.

Parents of Unaccompanied Minors Possible Victims of Scam

Scammers calling some parents in U.S. asking for money to be reunited with children.

Listen:

Some families of Central American child migrants living in the U.S. have received phone calls from scammers who tried to get money in exchange for false promises of reuniting parents with their children, according to government officials from El Salvador.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol from October to May along the U.S. border with Mexico. Most of those children are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Federal law requires that children be transferred to the Health and Human Services Department after Border Patrol processes the minors. Once under HHS custody, many children and teens go to temporary shelters.

Consulate officials from the children’s home countries work with the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement to reunite children with parents or relatives in the U.S.

Some of those families in the U.S. have received a call “from someone saying ‘we have your son here about to board a plane to go meet with you, but we need you to deposit money to this account in order for your child to be sent to you,” said José Joaquin Chacón, consul for El Salvador in Tucson.

There have been no official reports of scams, but the consulates of El Salvador and Guatemala have received complaints from families in the U.S.

“We have emphasized to parents and guardians not to answer phone calls about reunification with family and to be careful because it’s a scam if there is money involved,” Chacón said in Spanish.

Spanish-language media reported similar scams are happening in California.

Border Crisis
For more coverage of the ongoing border crisis, please click here.
Read More
By posting comments, you agree to our
AZPM encourages comments, but comments that contain profanity, unrelated information, threats, libel, defamatory statements, obscenities, pornography or that violate the law are not allowed. Comments that promote commercial products or services are not allowed. Comments in violation of this policy will be removed. Continued posting of comments that violate this policy will result in the commenter being banned from the site.

By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
The University of Arizona