An international graduate student reported last week that he was scammed into wiring money to an anonymous caller who claimed to be a government official and threatened to deport him.

The caller, who claimed to represent the immigration office, said the student would be forced out of the country within 24 hours if he did not pay a “substantial amount of money,” University Police Department Chief Kevin Hay said. Hay declined to provide the amount paid.

Hay said UPD notified the Metropolitan Police Department and federal authorities, adding, “No one else at GW has recently reported a similar incident.”

The phone call occurred off campus July 25 at about 10:30 a.m., according to GW’s crime log.

He said UPD did not have the case number for MPD’s police report, and he did not respond to requests for more details about the incident’s location in order to locate the report in the MPD database.