BANGOR – Bangor police have received several complaints in the last few days from residents who say they’ve been targeted by a telephone scammer asking for money.

The caller poses as a federal employee, requesting the resident by name and saying the resident has been randomly selected to receive an $8,000 grant, according to Sgt. James Owens of the Bangor Police Department. The catch is that the recipient must forward $249 to a St. Petersburg, Fla., post office box, or provide a checking account number so the money can be withdrawn electronically, Owens said.

“Apparently over the last three or four days we’ve had four or five of these [reports]. So this is an ongoing thing,” he said Wednesday.

None of the people who complained about the scam has sent money or provided banking information, but other victims who did probably aren’t aware they’ve been cheated, Owens said.

An 84-year-old woman who lives on Union Street, who declined to provide her name, said she received the suspicious call at 10 a.m. Wednesday from a man with a Spanish accent who asked for her husband. Her spouse has been dead for 13 years, the woman said.

“I doubted it right from the beginning,” she said. “When he mentioned the money to send, a real big red flag went up then.”

The woman stayed on the phone only because she thought the purported grant could be related to her husband’s service in World War II, she said. The caller claimed to be a representative of the U.S. government’s personnel-processing department, saying her husband had been chosen at random to receive the money.

“I figured that if they were cutting veterans’ benefits, they surely wouldn’t be sending an $8,000 grant,” she said.

The caller immediately hung up when the woman told him she wouldn’t mail $249 to receive the grant, she said.

The woman reported the scam about an hour later, which the Police Department logged as a general information complaint in order to track a potential pattern, Owens said. If anyone who reported the call had handed over money, a theft report would have been filed, he said.

“The old rule of thumb is when it sounds too good to be true, it usually is,” Owens said.

The Bangor Police Department can be reached at 947-7384.