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" how do they know the relationship of the victims"

Probably they don't. If the victim says "but I don't have a son" they just hang-up. Scattershot approach, not targeted.

or start with "your child has been arrested" when they say "what Mary Lou?" you respond with "yes we have your daughter".

At which point you can relax, because you have a boy called Josh.

If you have enough on the ball to do something like that, instead of operating on pure emotion, you're not going to fall for a lot of these scams anyway.

In Sweden there are lots of websites where you can look up the phone number and retrieve the address of that person, as well as other people living at the same address. From this information it is rather easy to do reverse lookups and figure out the potential relationships.

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