It starts with a call from your local law enforcement office. You’ve missed jury duty, and you are going to be arrested. You have to pay money or you’ll get arrested, and of course that’s going to show up on any background check. So in a panic, you follow their instructions and you pay - only to find out later that there was no warrant and you were not going to be arrested.

This is the jury duty arrest scam and it’s a very common one that people fall prey to every single year.

The whole sequence of events plays out something like this:

1. You get a call (or occasionally an email or social media contact, but phone is far more common) by someone who sounds like they’re from your country. If it’s a voicemail, there’s an urgent request to call them back. If they get you on the phone, it’s to let you know that you’ve skipped jury duty and you’re going to be arrested.
2. Sometimes they require you to not tell anyone about the purpose of the call and to remain connected.
3. You’ll often be directed to make some sort of payment that will be refunded once the judge talks to you. This payment will inevitably be a wire transfer, gift card, or bitcoin payment that can’t be clawed back. Sometimes the scammers wait until you’re driving down to a law enforcement office to have you do so.
4. You’ll eventually end up at law enforcement after giving the caller the gift card info/bitcoin/sending the money via wire, and find out that you are not actually under arrest.

How to protect yourself:
First of all, realize that you have the right to verify that this is a legit police officer with a legit warrant. Even if the phone number appears to be legit, you should hang up and call the actual law enforcement people to verify. If it’s a real issue, they will tell you, but most of the time they’ll tell you it’s a scam. Any law enforcement agency would prefer you check first, especially since arrests do not occur over the phone. (They might ask to turn yourself in; they will not talk bail or fines until you’re actually in front of a live person.)

A legit police officer will not tell you to stay on the line with them to “verify you are going to the station”, and they will not ask you to keep the reason for the call confidential. If the police department wants to discreetly arrest you, they will show up or ask you to come to them.

At least in the United States, the kind of warrant issued for failure to show up for jury duty is called a bench warrant. You are generally not going to need bail for these; they’re not the complex type of trial that would require you to be bailed out for. A bench warrant means that you might get arrested, have to go before a judge (representing yourself) to explain why you didn’t show up, spend some time being yelled at, and you may get a fine or a couple days in jail.

Also, you usually get a notice in the mail to show cause; this doesn’t come out of the blue in a phone call. In fact, with most bench warrants in most locations, you will get some kind of notification to show cause at a court. If you get arrested, it’s usually in conjunction with some other law enforcement action (such as a traffic stop or similar), not a phone call.

(There may be exceptions; if you’re missing jury duty in a small town/county where most everybody knows each other, they might well call; at that point, you hang up, call to make sure, and then deal with it. Larger metro areas don’t have as much enforcement capability for jury duty evaders and at best you might find yourself with a bench warrant.)