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Phone scam warning issued in Bedminster Township
May 16, 2010
By Bob Keeler
Staff Writer
There have been recent reports of residents getting calls from a person claiming to be a family member and asking that the person send money to the caller in Canada, police Chief Mark Ofner said at the May 12 Bedminster Township Board of Supervisors meeting.
Others have been told they won a lottery and will receive the money after first sending in a payment.
“People need to be mindful not to respond to those scams,” Ofner said.
With the coming of spring, there are also scams by people claiming to be driveway pavers or to do other unsolicited work around the home.
Board Chairman Eric Schaffhausen said residents should also be careful of identity theft, which he knows about from personal experience.
“We have had our own credit card misused twice in the last nine months, and it’s never left our hands,” Schaffhausen said.
Schaffhausen and Ofner also reminded residents to be careful of giving out their social security number.
If the caller is from your bank, they already have your social security number and will not ask for the full number, Ofner said.
“They’ll verify with four numbers, but not the entire number,” Ofner said.
In other matters at the May 12 meeting:
● Planning work continues for a new traffic light at the Route 611/413 intersection.
The plans have been pushed back a few weeks to add required handicap-accessibility ramps at the intersection, but the plans should soon be completed, Tom Fountain, township engineer, said.
● Two properties, totaling more than 165 acres, are being added to the preserved farmland in Bedminster. The township has one of the most aggressive land preservation programs in the area.
“These last two are big chunks of ground. It’s a big deal,” Schaffhausen said.
Conservation easements, in which further development of the site is restricted, are being purchased on both properties. The present owners continue to own the land and can use it or sell it.
About 72.96 acres of the Theodore Harrison property on Deep Run Road is being preserved, with a purchase price of $729,600, John Rice, township solicitor, said.
“A little bit less than half of this is coming from the Bucks County open space program,” Rice said. Township open space money pays for the remainder.
The other property is about 95.89 acres of the Mary and Jeffrey Miller property on Bedminster Road, with a purchase price of $767,128.
The county money will pay $317,434 in each of the two purchases, board member Glenn Wismer said.
● Five new police policies were put on the books.
The policies are required by the department’s insurance company. The department was already meeting the requirements, but this puts it in writing, Ofner said.
“It’s clear written policies of how things will be dealt with, how prisoners will be handled,” Ofner sad. “We have standard policies, but this is much more in-depth.”
The policies deal with things such as prisoner transportation, handling mentally ill people in custody, emergency medical services for prisoners, interrogation and interviews, he said.
Examples of the prisoner transportation policies include that prisoners will be handcuffed behind the back and will be seatbelted while being transported in a police car, Ofner said.
The written policies are based on standardized ones used in other towns, he said.
“We tweaked those a little to fit us,” Ofner said.
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