OKEECHOBEE — A 19-year-old Lake Worth man called the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office on July 25 to report a fraudulent call from Detective Dave Hamilton. According to the complainant, he recently made contact on a dating app called Adam for Adam with someone who claimed to be another 19-year-old male. Everyone on that site is supposed to have been verified by the app as being over 18.

After corresponding with this man for some time, he received a call from someone claiming to be Detective Dave Hamilton from the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office. The complainant was told by the “detective” that the person he had been corresponding with was actually a 16-year-old child. The detective” told him the boy’s mother had discovered the correspondence on her son’s phone, and the parents wanted him to pay $897.99 so they could purchase a new phone for the boy. If he did this, he would not be charged with sexting a minor. He was told to send the money to a Paypal account to avoid criminal charges.

The idea that a parent would accept money as a payoff made the complainant believe the whole thing was a scam, and he called the OCSO himself to see if there was such a detective. He discovered there was no one by that name at the OCSO.