By posing as one of Subway’s corporate officials, a phone scammer tricked a teenage employee into handing over roughly $700 from the Powell store’s cash register last week.

The scammer reportedly called Subway around 8 p.m. Wednesday night and told the employee they needed help with an ongoing investigation at the store.

“The employee was instructed to count the money … from the register to ensure the correct amount was there. The employee was to then purchase a gift card with a portion of the funds and provide the card numbers to the ‘corporate’ person,” Powell Police Chief Roy Eckerdt recounted in a Facebook post.

The corporate imposter reportedly claimed that local employees were about to be arrested because of discrepancies with the store’s cash — and that they needed to make sure Wednesday’s cash was safe. Eckerdt said the employee told police that she was told to divide the roughly $700 into two stacks and to purchase two prepaid credit cards; she bought one at Blair’s Market, just next door to Subway, but she was directed to buy the other at the Cody Walmart. (The employee was told she could keep $20 for gas, Eckerdt said.) The teenager got back to Powell late Wednesday night and soon realized she’d been tricked, coming into the Powell police station around 12:30 a.m. Thursday morning to report the scam.

Police posted the story to Facebook on Friday as a cautionary tale.

“The routes, strategies and schemes of scammers are truly unlimited,” Eckerdt wrote in the post.

In a follow-up interview, he said that “anybody that wants a gift card for payment, that should be a clue” that a request or demand is a scam.

“... Part of it is they know the inner workings and sound like they’re official,” Eckerdt said of the caller who posed as a Subway official. “But still.”

If someone is truly calling from a corporate office to check on employees, from the IRS to collect unpaid taxes or from the U.S. Marshals Service about an outstanding warrant, “they’re not going to take payment in gift card,” Eckerdt said.

While they’re generally not an accepted form of payment for legitimate business, prepaid credit cards and other types of gift cards are highly sought after by scammers. Not only can scammers activate and spend the cards with just the numbers on the back, it’s extremely difficult for law enforcement to trace where those funds end up.

If you’re not sure whether a phone call is legitimate, Eckerdt said to contact law enforcement. Experts say another way to check the legitimacy of a call is to hang up and call an official phone number for the agency or company.