GASTONIA, N.C. — A family in Gastonia is desperate for tips to find 16-year-old Luis Tario, who has been missing for months, but now they say they’re being targeted by scammers, and the calls have caused trauma at the worst possible time.
“It’s frustrating, and I can’t even explain the feeling,” said Nataly Tario, Luis’ sister.
Last Halloween, Tario’s brother took her car and vanished.
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“It’s hard enough just not having Luis around, you know, we try to go a day at a time,” Nataly told Channel 9’s Ken Lemon.
She created a flier with her phone number, hoping for tips. What she got shook the family to their core.
The first call came about three weeks into the search for Luis. It was through WhatsApp, from a Mexican exchange, around midnight. An older man was speaking Spanish.
Nataly and her mother listened, expecting information to bring Luis back home
“He was speaking very fast, being very aggressive, saying we have the car, we have Luis, though he didn’t say Luis ... like, ‘We have him,’” Tario said.
The man wanted to meet them nearby, even suggesting a local Walmart. As the call continued and more family members listened in, the call took an awful turn.
“Then he started going on, saying that he’s a part of a mafia or some kind of group, and he was wanting money from us in order to get Luis back. From there, all of us are downright frantic,” Tario said.
It got worse from there. Nataly Tario hung up, then the caller started sending text messages, including one they won’t forget.
“That’s when he messaged us that picture,” Tario said.
That picture showed a teen who appeared to be Hispanic with someone holding a knife at his throat.
“To see something like that, it’s horrifying,” Tario said.
There was a slight resemblance to her brother. It wasn’t enough to convince the family it was Luis, but certainly enough to scare them, especially their mother.
“Honestly, traumatizing to get a call and for us to be frantic to think that someone has the car, Luis and threatening to hurt him. I mean, we were like, it was just a horrible, horrible experience,” Tario said.
They called police, and they were told it was a scam. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last one.
Every time there was a new reward or new attention on the case, Nataly got more calls. Those, too, were on WhatsApp and from a Mexican exchange.
“How many of those calls have you had, do you think?” Channel 9’s Ken Lemon asked.
“I would say at this point, probably five or six, if not more,” Tario said. “Every time I hear a phone ring, I tense up at this point. Every time I see an out-of-country number, I, you know, I have to brace myself."
She refuses to answer the calls now, insisting on text conversations.
“I say, can you please send a text message? And he says no, that’s now how these things work,” Tario said. “And I said, ‘How can I help you?’ He says, ‘You have to answer the call.’ And I said, ‘No, thank you. I want to come to a deal if you want to, but if you don’t, that will be a problem.’”
Ross Bulla with the Treadstone Group has led major security operations across the globe, and he says most scam calls like this involve missing pets, not people.
“What we are seeing follows a known extortion pattern,” Bulla said. “I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, but to take advantage of someone who is missing a teenage child...”
He showed us how easy it is for scammers to pull this off. He uses his phone to link with a digital phone service in just a few minutes. He was able to alter his voice, and it sounded like he was at an airport, calling from a West Virginia number.
The encryption, voice alterations, and background changes make calls like this hard to trace. Still, Bulla says if you get one, document it and call police immediately.
We asked if the scammers targeting the Tario family might actually be local.
“It’s a certainty,” Bulla said. “It’s disgusting, it’s disappointing. How could you even think of doing this to someone? Like shame on you.”
The family still holds out hope that eventually one call will come through, the one with the answers they pray for every day.
“It hurts me truly every time, because I just want calls about tips for my brother, and then all I get is harassment,” Tario said.
Bulla says people do this because it works. Not always, but it works enough to keep the scammers going. He and ‘and’ law enforcement agencies told us there are some private social media groups and websites where folks can post about missing people or pets - but scammers can still get information from them.
Your best option is to route tips through law enforcement or a verified search group.
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