Cape Coral woman receives death threats via texts

CAPE CORAL, Fla. — A text scam left one mother fearing for her children’s lives.

The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said she received a series of threats on Tuesday, saying her children would be killed if she didn’t pay.

“They were using words like ‘You know I’m gonna terminate’ and ‘I’ve been following you,'” she said. “If somebody was following me, I would’ve recognized they’d been following me.”

But since those threats involved her children, she started to worry.

“I’m going to take it seriously about someone threatening my children,” she said. “You can say whatever you want about me, but you bring my children into it and I got the mama bear coming out.”

While Cape Coral police don’t believe the texts are a legitimate threat, they are urging people to be careful about oversharing on social media.

“It’s a typical play on fear where they’re trying to get fear to overwhelm your reason,” Cpl. Phil Mullen. “They know information on you from Facebook or social media. They’ll gather information on your cars or on your family’s details and they’ll try to get you to make a snap decision to send money.”

The woman said one of the red flags she notices was that most of the information the scammer had was gathered from Facebook photos.

Cape Coral police suggest always using privacy settings to protect personal information.