Beware of these new speeding ticket scams

If you use the words “Arizona Traffic Ticket” and “scam” interchangeably, chances are you’ve recently been pulled over by an Arizona State Trooper. Most citations are perfectly legitimate, of course. Maybe the officer clocked you a way above the speed limit. (Or you got a photo ticket.) But a few aren’t. The latest speeding ticket scams are more sophisticated — and often illegal.

While there are questionable ways to entrap you, but there are also entirely illegal ways to extract your speeding “fines.” For example, consider this elaborate new speeding ticket scam in the Washington, D.C., area. Hackers pretending to be police reportedly sent emails saying you’d been caught on a speed camera and received a violation. To see it, you need to log in. Once you do, they harvest passwords and other personal information and steal your identity.

Police say they don’t send citations by email. Indeed, most police departments still contact motorists by snail-mail, making these new speeding ticket scams fairly easy to spot.

In the Fort Worth, Texas, area, scammers have used the phone to extract payment from unwitting motorists. One woman lost $3,000 to a scammer who used the names of real police officers to rip her off. She might have double-checked with the real sheriff’s department, which does not accept payments by phone.

Perhaps the most common speed trap scam is dead simple: An email claims you’ve been caught on camera and contains a link to pay your fine. That’s what happened to drivers in Landisville, Pa., earlier this year. Of course, the police department there doesn’t accept online payments, either. Fortunately, the local TV station, ABC 27, got word out before the scammers could steal even more money from drivers.