Dozens Charged with Scamming 15,000 Victims Through Fake IRS Calls | Hacker News Reader

Dozens Charged with Scamming 15,000 Victims Through Fake IRS Calls

npr.org

101 pointshappy-go-lucky40 comments

So the story leaves out a lot of the interesting details.. but has been in thr headlines in India.

It was a massive, coordinated operation by the Mumbai police teams who discovered this by accident. Almost 200 policemen took part in the exercise, but most of them didnt know about the mission (to prevent leaks).

Almost an Infernal Affairs like operation - http://m.rediff.com/news/special/how-the-rs-500-crore-scam-w...

Thank you for the link. Disgusting people!

A company of 700 people that are morally corrupt and seemingly unapologetic.

Scam Phone Calls Continue; IRS Identifies Five Easy Ways to Spot Suspicious Calls

https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/scam-phone-calls-continue-i...

Things the IRS will never do:

1. Call to demand immediate payment, nor will we call about taxes owed without first having mailed you a bill..

2. Demand that you pay taxes without giving you the opportunity to question or appeal the amount they say you owe.

3. Require you to use a specific payment method for your taxes, such as a prepaid debit card.

4. Ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone.

5. Threaten to bring in local police or other law-enforcement groups to have you arrested for not paying.

However the IRS will soon be contracting private debt collection agencies [1] which may use some of those methods.

[1]:https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/new-private-debt-collection...

Similar scams are also going on with utility companies and the level of activity has definitely increased this year. The spammers spoof Caller ID for a utility company such as PG&E, then tell the mark that their electricity and gas will be cut off unless they pay a past-due bill. They try to hit me at least once a week.

https://www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/newsdetails/index.page...

> The spammers spoof Caller ID for a utility company such as PG&E, then tell the mark that their electricity and gas will be cut off unless they pay a past-due bill.

This is one of the myriad of times where being poor is expensive. I know this scam wouldn't work on me today. Why? My utility bills are paid automatically through credit card charges made by the utility. I get e-mails every month or two when the charges are made. If I don't see an e-mail around the usual time, I can log in and investigate before the bill is past due. Even if the charge messes up for some reason, I have the money handy to pay both the utility charge and the late payment fee if it's my error.

Someone who doesn't have as much doesn't have those choices. I remember when I made far less than I do now and, yes, it's entirely plausible that I would get a call from the light company demanding payment or they'll have the person standing next to my meter go ahead with the disconnection. So I would have fallen for that scam in the past because it was plausible. It sucks that scammers prey on people who are in these kinds of vulnerable positions.

I get these calls now and then, and I always say I'll mail a check. A legitimate call will say ok, the illegit ones will demand payment over the phone.

I received several of these annoying calls. I knew it was a scam but I was amazed at their brazenness; how can they get away with claiming to be from the IRS and demand money? Good to hear they have been charged.

>how can they get away with claiming to be from the IRS and demand money?

I feel like these sorts of scams increasingly involve calling/emailing people in one country from a different country. This is presumably because enforcement within any single country is becoming more and more effective. By targeting people in other countries you create a situation where multiple police forces need to cooperate which presumably means you are able to operate for longer before arrests start happening.

I'm so glad. I was one of the people they tried to target. I tried to keep them on the line and extract as much info as I could and reported it to the IRS. I feel bad for the people they actually got money from and I hope they get it back.

I honestly haven't met anyone that WASN'T called with an IRS scam this year. It's amazing how they were able to call so many numbers and it lasted so long.

My primary number has been a google voice number with a weird area code for the last 4 years, and I have gotten maybe 4 robotcalls in that time.

I find it amazing that we haven't figured out how to solve the problem yet.

I also got a call too, I knew it was a scam as soon as he asked for my name and address. I tried to string him on and get some information but he hung up on me. I called back and he answered "Hello IRS" and hung up a moment later.

I had no idea this scamming was so prevalent. I feel like I should check with my mother to see if she got any strange calls.

You may want to check this out, too: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/04/11/473...

It's a pretty effective scam for a few reasons:

-You call THEM back, which immediately establishes trust (since you called them!) and makes it easier for you to fork over information/payment

-It's pretty scary to hear that the IRS is suing you, since almost everyone thinks they may have done something on a past tax filing that wasn't completely correct

It is effective because nobody ever knows if they own the IRS money or not. When you have a tax system like the USA it is impossible to know what you owe.

$300 million? Hot damn. I wonder if they would have gotten away with it if they'd stopped when they were merely wealthy instead of millionaires.

I got several of these calls. Transcript of the voicemail. It's comical. Sad that some fell for it. I'm just glad the local cops didn't show up and take me into custody.

>>>>> Mission team of IRS we have just received a notification regarding your tax filings from the headquarters which will get expired in the next 24 working hours and once again expired after that you will be taken under custody by the local cops as there are for serious allegations pressed on your name at this moment we would request you to get back to us so that we can discuss about this case before taking any legal action against you

That sounds like deliberate word salad. Maybe the effect is to hit with you as many words as possible and effect some kind of change in brain state like whatever it it is that Derren Brown [0] does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown

Here's the source complaint & indictment

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/file/905837/download

Couldn't we spend less than $300M on our telco infrastructure to prevent shit like this? Black listing rented phone numbers, preventing caller ID spoofing, etc...

Yea, let's perpetrate a scam like this to raise money to prevent scams like this from occurring.

Or do you think the money is going to come from somewhere else? Why should I have to pay for the ever increasing coddling of the American public?

Troll

No, just someone with a different opinion than you.

Here's a video of said calls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuVFcizDwqw

Another one, where they tried to scam a tax professional:

https://youtu.be/poFAzDCGLrI?t=36s

I am still waiting for them to prosecute the fake business loan scams. I get calls daily with the message that I have been approved for a 250K business loan.

Lol. The IRS doesn't call you when they demand money, they just empty your bank account or come to your house and take all your shit.

No they don't do that either. At least not as their first move.

They start with letters. It takes a lot if ignoring before they seize your assets.

"The scammers have "done their research" using publicly available information, including sites like Facebook, he said. They identify vulnerabilities to exploit."

Stop posting personal info on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. Best way to keep in touch is Whatsapp and any other personal messenger app.

> Best way to keep in touch is Whatsapp…

…which is owned by Facebook, and shares account information with the Facebook Platform?

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/25/12638698/whatsapp-to-start...

But that information is not available to a random stalker

Are you suggesting these people work for Whatsapp?

You could make the news with that kind of info.

Not at all. Just pointing out the inconsistency in recommending that people avoid social media sites like Facebook... and use a tool that's owned by Facebook, and which shares account information with it, as a replacement.

But it is a different situation. The implication is people posted on Facebook and it wasn't Facebook who ran the IRS scheme by reading the data on the backend, the data was shared by the users. WhatsApp doesn't work like Facebook's main product, it is more like SMS for example.

So the ownership of Facebook is irrelevant in this case.

Now perhaps it is possible to argue if someone hacked into Facebook to steal all data. But I don't think that's the case here.

No one is suggesting this, you are implying this. Stop distorting the conversation

The implication is posting to Facebook and then using WhatsApp is the same and IRS scammers could have gotten the information from both because they are owned by Facebook.

But the point of ownership of Facebook is moot unless the claim is that somehow all this data was scrapped from the backend (WhatsApp is a messaging app, even claims end to end encryption too).

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