Got a Call Saying You Missed Jury Duty? Here's Why It's a Scam.

TL;DR

• The FTC warned on June 11, 2026 about a scam where a caller claims you missed jury duty and threatens arrest unless you pay a fine right now.
• Real courts contact missed jurors by U.S. Mail, never by a phone call demanding money, and no government agency takes payment in gift cards, crypto, payment apps, or wire transfers.
• The caller ID can show your local sheriff or a court, because scammers spoof those numbers, so a “real-looking” number proves nothing.
• If you get one: hang up, then call the court back using a number you look up yourself, and report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
• On iPhone, turn on Silence Unknown Callers and use content-based filtering for the follow-up texts, since these callers rotate numbers daily.

The phone rings. The caller ID says it’s your county sheriff. A calm, official-sounding voice tells you that you failed to appear for jury duty, a judge has issued a bench warrant, and you can clear it today by paying a fine. If you hang up, they say, an officer will be sent to your home.

It is a scam. Every part of it. Here is how it works and exactly what to do.

What the jury duty scam sounds like

The FTC flagged this one on June 11, 2026. Most versions start with an urgent call from someone claiming to be a U.S. Marshal or an officer at your local police department. To throw you off balance, the caller often already knows your full name and address. They say you missed jury duty, which you didn’t, and they threaten to arrest you, which they won’t, unless you pay a fine using a payment app or cryptocurrency.

Then comes the new twist. After the call, you get a text or email with a document that looks like an official arrest warrant, complete with a case number and the amount you supposedly owe. It looks real. It’s fake, top to bottom.

Scammers in 2026 have polished the performance. Court and law enforcement advisories describe callers who recite real badge numbers, real judge names, and real courthouse addresses to sound legitimate. Some work in pairs: a “low-level officer” discovers your failure to appear, then transfers you to a “court clerk” or “supervisor” who handles the payment. That hand-off is theater, designed to make a phone call feel like a bureaucracy.

Why the caller ID looks real

Here’s the part that fools careful people. The number on your screen can say “County Sheriff” or show a real court phone number. That doesn’t mean the call came from there.

Spoofing lets anyone make any number appear on your caller ID. Scammers copy the real number of your local court, the sheriff’s office, or the U.S. Marshals, so the call passes your first gut check. Some operations now layer in AI-generated background noise, the hum of a busy office, to sell the idea that you’ve reached a real government line.

So the rule is simple. A real-looking number proves nothing. Treat the content of the call, not the caller ID, as your signal.

How you know it’s a scam in one breath

The FTC’s tells are short and they hold every time.

Real law enforcement will never text or email you an arrest warrant. Courts never demand payment over the phone, and neither does any other government agency. And the payment method gives it away instantly: only a scammer insists you can pay only with a gift card, a payment app like Zelle or Cash App, cryptocurrency, or a wire transfer through Western Union or MoneyGram. Those methods are favorites because they’re fast and nearly impossible to claw back.

There’s one more fact worth burning into memory. If you actually skip jury duty, the court mails you a notice. Federal and state courts are consistent on this: they do not call prospective jurors to demand money or personal information, and a real failure-to-appear is handled by U.S. Mail, not a surprise phone call with a payment deadline.

What to do if you get the call

Hang up. You don’t owe the caller an explanation, and staying on the line only gives a trained manipulator more time to work.

If a small voice says “but what if it’s real,” good. Check it the safe way. Look up your county court or clerk’s office number yourself, from the court’s official website or a past mailed summons, and call them directly. Do not call the number the scammer gave you, and do not trust a number they texted you. A two-minute call to the real court ends the doubt.

Then report it. File at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and if you want to help your community, also report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov. Reports are how these operations get traced and shut down.

Imposter scams like this one are the most reported scam category in the country, which is why the FTC highlighted them again for World Elder Abuse Awareness Day on June 15. Older adults get targeted hard, but plenty of people in their 30s and 40s pay too, because nobody’s thinking clearly with the word “warrant” ringing in their ears.

If your parent might get this call

If you’re reading this for an older parent, skip the lecture about being careful. These calls fool sharp people. The scams have gotten really good, and the script is built to trigger panic before reason kicks in.

Give them one sentence they can keep by the phone: “The court never calls to take payment. Hang up and call me.” That’s it. The goal isn’t to teach them to out-argue a scammer on the line. It’s to give them permission to hang up on someone who sounds official, which is the exact thing the scam is engineered to make them afraid to do.

If they did pay, or shared bank details, move fast and skip the blame. Call their bank to freeze the account or card, then read the FTC’s What To Do if You Were Scammed. The faster the bank knows, the better the odds of stopping the money. And be ready for the follow-up: a second caller offering to “recover” the lost funds for a fee is almost always the same crew running the recovery scam we covered here.

How to cut these off on iPhone

You can’t stop a scammer from spoofing a court number. You can make it much less likely that the call reaches you live.

Turn on Silence Unknown Callers. Go to Settings, tap Phone (on newer iOS it’s under Settings, then Apps, then Phone), and switch on Silence Unknown Callers. Calls from numbers not in your contacts go straight to voicemail, and you see them in your recents without the phone ever ringing. That alone defangs the cold call, because a recorded “warrant” threat sitting in voicemail is a lot easier to recognize as nonsense than a live voice pressuring you.

The trade-off is real, so know it going in. Silencing unknown callers can also quiet a legitimate call from a number you don’t have saved, like a return call from a doctor’s office or a delivery driver. If you’re expecting a call from someone new, toggle it off for the afternoon.

Then there’s the follow-up text with the fake warrant. Blocking the sender’s number won’t help much, because these operations burn through throwaway numbers daily. What survives is the wording. Phrases like “failure to appear,” “bench warrant,” “jury duty,” and the demand to call a specific number repeat across thousands of these messages even as the phone numbers churn.

That’s the gap Not Today is built to close. Set keyword rules for terms like “warrant,” “jury duty,” and “failure to appear,” and let the community database (currently 85,000+ reported numbers) catch the rest as people flag new senders. Optional on-device AI detection picks up the reworded variants that slip past a plain keyword match. We wrote more about why content-based filtering beats blocking numbers one by one here.

The mindset matters more than any single setting. Government agencies don’t cold-call you for money. The second a caller wants a gift card, an app transfer, or crypto to make a “warrant” disappear, you already have your answer. Hang up.

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Not Today is a free spam-blocking app for iPhone. We built it to catch spam before it reaches you, using keyword rules, a community database of 85,000+ reported numbers, and optional AI detection. No account required. Download on the App Store.