Slashdot Mirror
Fake Call Centers in India Scam Americans Of Millions (ap.org)
An anonymous reader writes:Indian police have arrested 70 people and are questioning hundreds more after uncovering a massive scam to cheat thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars by posing as U.S. tax authorities and demanding unpaid taxes, a police officer said Thursday. According to police in Mumbai, the yearlong scam involved running fake call centers which sent voice mail messages telling U.S. nationals to call back because they owed back taxes. Those who called back and believed the threats would fork out thousands of dollars to "settle" their case, Mumbai police officer Parag Marere said Thursday. The scam brought in more than $150,000 a day, Marere said without giving a total sum. If the scam netted that amount daily, it would have made almost $55 million in one year. Some victims were also told to buy gift vouchers from various companies, and hand over the voucher ID numbers which the impostors then used to make purchases, Marere said. Police said they are likely to file charges against many of the 600 or more people still being questioned on suspicion of running the fake call centers, housed on several stories of a Mumbai office building.
It showed up as an upstate New York phone number. In a thick Indian accent, "This is agent Steve Smith with IRS". I played along just to see how it went and they were trying to get me to go to Walmart and buy two pre-paid iTunes gift cards for $490 each and then tell them the numbers on each card. This was supposedly to pay my IRS debt. How does anyone fall for this? Later I amused myself by calling them back and then doing a three way call and calling the number again and listening to the two scammers try and figure out what each other was talking about.
I've had one recently that poses as my cellphone carrier threatening to cut off service unless they are paid immediately.
I thought the real ones are much worse. Fake ones only take savings, The real ones take your income.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
When they tried to call Donald Trump to demand back taxes and he told them to fuck off.....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Are you able to crowbar a anti-government screed in to every story? That's a pretty neat party trick.
It's a sad indictment of American intelligence that we have citizens who actually believe the government wants to be paid in iTunes gift cards.
"Some victims were also told to buy gift vouchers from various companies, and hand over the voucher ID numbers which the impostors then used to make purchases..."
Yeah, because the IRS usually tells people who owe back taxes to pay them back in gift vouchers. Yup, totally makes sense.
I really don't know who I want to punish for this; those who capitalize on stupidity and ignorance, or those creating such a market.
Any parent knows damn well at some point you had to let your kids learn the hard way, because no matter what wisdom you tried to impart, experience needed to be the teacher. Perhaps more of that tactic needs to be applied to society. Only way you're going to reduce this kind of crime is to address the root cause of it.
TL; DR - We need to stop rewarding ignorance.
I wonder if it gets included in our GDP figures.
I think the bigger problem is a lack of critical thinking skills. If "the IRS" called me up and said I owed thousands of dollars in taxes, the first thing I'd do would be to call my accountant or to call the IRS directly (using a number from their website, not given to me from the caller) to double-check this. Even if I didn't think to double-check it right away, a demand that I pay my tax bill by purchasing gift cards to various stores and giving them the numbers would raise a ton of red flags. What does the IRS need with iTunes cards?
Too many people hear a pitch over the phone or via e-mail and just go along with it because it doesn't even occur with them to think about the request being made.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Mine assumes that anyone calling on a landline has divine right to her money.
Umm, the call centres are fake? No, the call centres are real. The owners and employees are engaged in fraud, deception, intimidation, and theft. Gangster style.
Q. What is Calvin's monster snowman called? A. The Torment Of Existence Weighed Against The Horror of Non Being
When they only took your job not your grandmas savings.
I'm astonished to learn that there are actually people out there that accept that trading gift cards is a viable method for taking care of back taxes. This is less convincing than a Nigerian prince needing payment so that he can collect money for you.
My faith in humanity continues to wither.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Does the IRS even legitimately call non-businesses on the phone?
For the adamantly small sample size of the two people I know of with issues on their taxes or back taxes owed, the first step was getting papers by certified mail.
For one of those two cases, who I'm pretty sure was actually trying to pull something and ignored those letters, they sent an agent to his home that brought along a uniformed sheriff, I'm sure both with plenty of identification of who they were.
Even if no red flags like gift cards were involved in the call, they would still need to send paperwork showing what you owed and why (which is generally what comes with the information required to make payment)
It's mind boggling such scams could work.
Now if the Indian Police could shut down the windows support scammers....
It even says on the mailed statements you get from the IRS that they will only ever contact you by mail, never by phone.
From the description, it sounds like they setup real call centers to make the scam possible. A fake call center would be something that purports itself to handle calls, but in actuality, does not.
We need a simple rule for such cases:
1. You will be asset stripped between the fines and restitution to the victims.
2. You and your spouse will be blacklisted from government aid and charities funded by government aid (on penalty of imprisonment for the aid workers).
3. If you commit any additional crime to rebuild what you lost, you will serve a bare minimum of twice whatever the maximum ordinary sentence is.
4. If #3 involves the use of felony violence, finish them with capital punishment on principle.
White collar crime is pretty much always a crime of the worst social parasitism, not desperation. It can and should be stamped out with the least compassion the system can muster.
That's exactly what my mom did the first time the "IRS" called her. She called her tax preparer and he told her it was a scam.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Canadians too. There's been lots of news about this recently. Apparently one woman bought thousands of dollars of iTunes cards for this, and it only came to light because a store manager suspected something was awry when she tried to buy out his whole stock. Even after being told by the manager it was a scam, she went to another store to try and buy more cards and didn't clue in until he called the police and *they* came and told her so.
It boggles my mind that people will continue along their course of idiocy even when told they're being scammed.
You can't fix stupid, but apparently you can buy a lot of apps/music from it.
While this particular case is about Indian Call Centers, this kind of thins is very widespread and not limited to just Indians. It has also been going on for a very long time -- centuries (though obviously they only started using phones about 100 years ago and emails & the internet a couple decades ago)
No idea. Ask Satya Nadella. He might know.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> Why do Indians think it's allowable to steal from White people?
I'm 40 and I haven't made a ton of money for most
This says more about our insane tax code and US citizens' absolute, paralyzing fear of the IRS and its capricious life-wrecking ways than it does about the fact that there are such things as con men taking advantage of it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Tom Woods got one of these calls and decided to make an episode out of it. It's either hilarious or pathetic, depending on your frame of mind. These particular scammers wanted to be paid in Target cards. It's instructive, from multiple perspectives, to listen to their (successful) technique.
I heard an interview once with an Indian call center worker who was trained to treat Americans as if they were seven-year-old Indian children. I'm sure there are some /.'ers who can appreciate the way it feels to have to talk to an idiot who makes ten times your salary. Some of these call center workers probably feel the rubes deserve to be bilked out of their savings. That's no ethical position, but one we might recognize.
Once they figured out Tom was on to them, they called him an asshole, but the tone was definitely more like that one would use with a peer. It's obviously only economically efficient to talk to idiots when such scams are in play (which is why the Nigerian scams are purposely written to be so obvious - auto-prefiltering their marks).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes. Big government is pretty pervasive in its effects.
That's sort of the point.
-Styopa
Because it's difficult and expensive. You pretty much have to do it with liberal arts. E.g. reading Shakespeare and the like. That's because it's the only subject simple enough to accommodate all levels of intelligence (within reason). Oh, and you can't teach critical thinking to somebody in their 60s with dementia. You can watch over them, but again, difficult and expensive.
. It all comes down to 5 words: who's gonna pay for it?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You're right. The IRS doesn't do phone calls to individuals. They send certified mail instead. Which is leads to another good point. Even if I (somehow) temporarily forgot that the IRS doesn't call people and even if I didn't think to contact my accountant, I'd demand that "the IRS" send me paperwork detailing exactly what I owed and why. My guess is that the call center scammer "IRS agents" might resort to threats to intimidate me into paying, but wouldn't be able to follow up their call with realistic looking papers.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Where are you getting 47% from?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
the iTunes cards should be a dead give-away of fraud. BUT --- I heard an interview with a woman who received TWO telephone calls at the same time - both working together (she had two phones, cell & landline). This scam was rather sophisticated.
The first caller was the normal "IRS calling - you owe us money" The second caller (caller id was "911") "This is FBI coming to get you now - stay where you are" First caller - "pay us now and I will cancel the FBI agent." She went to Western Union to make the payment as requested - and Western Union blocked her payment realizing it was fraud (they have a dept monitoring this). WU customer service handed her their phone over the desk "WU special agent wants to talk to you" The WU agent on this second line took 30 minutes to talk the woman down from repeatedly trying to make the payment ("no 'mam - this is a scam. no really.") She had the "FBI Agent" still on her cell phone - and WU agent on the store phone. FBI agent demanding "do it now or go to jail" and second person saying "no - it's a scam"
Her backstory was that she owned a small business and had somebody else doing her taxes - so she didn't fully know what was up. The call was semi-plausible coupled with the high pressure tactic.
Critical thought was not obvious.
Just for fun try to run a 419 scam on them and see what happens. Also pretend to be hard of hearing and make it sound like they want to give you money. Etc.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Oh stop it. I've dealt with the IRS on numerous occasions. They have inevitably been polite, professional and they at least attempt to be helpful. Yes, they're the IRS. Yes, it's the Evil Big Guberment. But how the hell are you supposed to run a civilization without taxes and how are you supposed to collect taxes without something like the IRS?
Don't rush the answer. Think this through carefully. Please do NOT pick up that copy of 'Atlas Shrugged'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Anybody that falls for this shit deserves the loss. How fucking dumb do you have to be no not only fall for such an obvious scam, but to go so far as to buy fucking gift cards to pay back the IRS!?
I'm actually kind of surprised that these scammers don't sell off lists of phone numbers of all the morons that fall for this shit. Those lists could potentially go for as much as hacked password lists.
His ass, obviously.
Eat the rich.
Fortunately, you just export the result of stupidity, the stupidity stays perfectly sealed within the country.
Thank $deity, I mean, who in their sane mind would import stupidity?
And yes, I'm European, and yes, I will shut up here, it's not necessary to point out the very obvious in a comment to this one, I know, and I'm very pissed that we actually do just that right now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Every time some scammer calls you. Pretend you need to answer the door or something. Ask them to hold on and you will be right back. Put the phone down and leave it for 10 minutes while you watch tv. If you are not doing anything, play with them by pretending to be hard of hearing and ask them to repeat everything 3 times. Play dumb so they have to explain everything in minute detail. WASTE THEIR TIME. If they lost money on every call, they would stop doing it. Better yet, we need someone to write a program to route their incoming scam call back to their own call center so that you are wasting the time for two of them at once until they figure out they are just talking to the guy down the hall.
Today's Word: empathy
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
Have you ever taken an IQ test? Best I can tell, they basically measure your interest and commitment to school subjects. Retardation is one possible reason for a low IQ score, but that's not what's going on here.
Dude, I'm not the biggest fan of taxation, but I have dealt with the IRS before, and they have always been polite, and in the last case I'd dealt with them, they actually erred on my side, finding an error on my part and causing me to actually get a sizable refund (instead of my making a payment like I had expected).
Hell, I remember last year going to the IRS office (Portland, OR), and being informed that I had to make an appointment first by phone (or online), but the receptionist saying immediately afterwards "...but no worries, Sir - we just changed this policy last week, so let's see if we can fit you in since you're here anyway." I was in and out less than 30 minutes later.
The IRS may be many things (and in some cases has been used rather viciously as an illegal political weapon by our current president), but the ordinary citizen usually gets polite, fair, and courteous treatment - so long as he isn't obviously trying to scam anyone or screw the gov out of paying what he owes.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I denounce this racist spin for advancing the hillbilly prejudice against brown people as rapis..., err, never mind, scammers. This advances the othering and contributes to building of evil walls instead of welcoming bridges.
Obviously, specifying the criminals' country of origin, sex and gender-identity (not the same!!!!) as well as religion or skin-color, is racist.
(Unless, of course, they are White Christian males.)
And Poynter are the same openly liberal people who own the Tampa Bay Times, and politifact. But y'know, they're totally objective in their judgements, no bias whatsoever there.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
This type scam has been going on for almost a year now, not all the scammers use the gift card route, some have used checks and cc numbers
These indian scammers buy blocks of cell phone numbers from U.S. telecom companies, then buy another block when they're reported/investigated in the USA. We need laws to bring the hammer down on the U.S. companies that have been all too willing to continually resupply these scum with the cell numbers. Make them responsible for restitution of the victims.
Damn! Now we're even outsourcing our IQ tests!
You mean I'll stop getting those "This is IRS, you owe us, call us back or we sue" voice mails?
Righteous
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I suspect that most people smart enough to read slashdot already know this, but: The IRS will never make first contact via phone. They will make first contact by mail. That is paper mail. They will not use e-mail much less facebook, IM, or text.
Unless you are already actively working with (or against) someone in the IRS regarding your case and are expecting contact through other means, you can be confident that any phone calls you receive are fraudulent.
Also, and even more blatantly, the IRS will not take payment in the form of gift cards.
If "the IRS" called me up and said I owed thousands of dollars in taxes, the first thing I'd do would be to call my accountant ...
I dare say the ones who fall hardest for this scam are the ones who definitely don't have an accountant. Don't be ludicrous.
So what you're saying is that when you launch your tax fraud call center you should launch a BGP attack to remap the irs.gov web servers to a website of your own design? Good to know!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That has been my experience. I've felt like the IRS people I dealt with (when I had to deal with a case of ID theft, thanks to a previous job that viewed security as having no ROI, thus all my info became pretty much public) bent over backwards in order to find me records I needed.
Call me crazy, but taxes are the price one pays for civilization. I'd rather hand over some cash than have to man my own gun turrets, or pay a meter so I can use a park bench. Yes, I might pay taxes for a road that I may not used everyday, but someone is paying taxes for a road they don't use everyday that I drive on as well.
Maybe that's why you score so low. If it's asking you what year the war of 1812 started or what religion the pope is it's not an IQ test, it's a general knowledge quiz.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are lots of versions of this and they target multiple western countries. I'm in the UK and had them claiming to be the HMRC, that I own Company and/or Personal Tax, British Telecom and Sky with outstanding bills, Google and Microsoft claiming I have virus. My brother living Australia has had them as well.
They always use a Western Name yet have strong Indian accents, often so strong they cannot even be understood.
I sometimes deliberately waste their time, sometimes I pretend to be impressed they have got a job with Google etc. Their mum must be proud, but I only do business with pious people, and game them into a trap. Other times I slowly build up passive-aggressive digs.
I don't recall that it tested you on trivia. But it tested you on skills. For instance there was a timed math test with problems of increasing difficulty. So if you spent more time learning math, and learned more advanced skills you would score higher.
According to IRS figures, about 47% of the Federal income tax returns (it varies by year -- I think the 47% number is a bit old) show no tax liability and some of these result in "negative" tax because of being eligible for refundable tax credits.
Of course, some people don't even file a return because they don't have any traceable income that requires them to (and either are not eligible for a refundable credit or don't know they are). On the other hand, some returns reflect two people who are married and filing jointly. So the number of "returns filed" is not the same as the number of "people".
This does not include, of course, state and local taxes (such as property tax or sales tax or state income tax or business taxes) or federal taxes such as the tax on gasoline and diesel or payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) which many of these "47%" do pay.
And, the claim that these 47% "never paid taxes before" is likely wrong -- some people pay federal income taxes some years and not other years. In particular, retired people who are largely or entirely living on their Social Security may not owe any Federal income taxes but may have paid Federal income taxes for many decades of their working lives.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
My first attempt to write this got submitted before I was finished writing it.
I haven't made a ton of money, and I'm now 40, with a two-year-old daughter. That worries me - how am I going to be able to pay for everything I need when I'm old and possibly sick? I may not be able to keep working forever, and from ages 65-90 is 25 years of expenses I'll need to cover. The voters have decided to let social security go bankrupt rather than making some small changes while there's still time, so I can't rely on social security. Who knows what my daughter my need - just braces if I'm lucky, something MUCH more expensive if I'm not. So I'm living very frugally and saving as much as I can. I go home and make spaghetti while my friends go out to eat.
Since I do have a slight clue, I don't put the money I'm saving under my mattress, I put it in a mutual fund, where it will grow. That means I own a tiny bit of many large companies - Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, BOA, etc. When P&G makes money selling cereal or AT&T makes money providing phone service, my savings makes a little bit of money. I pray that I can save enough, and earn enough from those savings, to be able to pay my electric bill when I'm 80.
For some reason, which you may or may not understand, about 25% of Slashdot commenters think it's perfectly okay to steal from those of us who save. Stealing from AT&T, or P&G, or BOA is fine, they say, those are big companies. Those greedy capitalist stockholders who save for retirement don't need their money! It's fine for me to take it, Ray won't actually need his money that he's been saving. If you can understand that thinking, I bet the Indian scammers think much the same way. Personally, I can't understand it at all, but then again maybe that's because I'm simply not a crook.
Another 30% of Slashdot think taking our savings is a great idea, we should pass a law saying anyone who saved has to give their money to people who chose to buy a new smartphone instead of saving. I'm not sure how that reasoning works either. You blow $650 on a new iPhone, to replace the perfectly good iPhone you already have. I keep my cheap Walmart phone and save my money for when my daughter needs something. Therefore you, with the help of federal agents brandishing guns, should take my money that I saved so you can blow it on some more stupid crap? I don't understand that at all, other than I understand that selfishness and self-centeredness exists, and it seems many of these people are horribly, horribly spoiled. They're in the top 3% wealthiest people in the world, and whine that sometimes they don't have quite enough bandwidth to run their both of their two 4K TVs at full resolution, unless they pay the $10 upgrade (meaning they'd have to actually work for a few minutes).
Neither my wife nor I answer the phone if the Caller-ID isn't one we recognize, so I've just seen these things in the voicemail transcripts that get emailed to me, but they're relentless high-volume callers. Or (past-tense, I hope) were. The few I listened to did sound computer generated.
Wow, that was extremely racist. Where does the distinction between blacks and whites EVER show up in this article? Furthermore, your statistic is both wrong and short-sighted.
Not what I took. The problems did increase in difficulty, but not in sophistication. There were things I learned that helped a lot, but they tended to be things that benefited me in daily life, such as memory tricks.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
not to mention going after the donors to the organizations...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
> The organization discovered the IRS was using donor lists it extracted from tax-exempt
> organizations during its anti-Tea Party crusade to target the donors themselves for tax audits.
And Google on the phrase...
Lois Lerner hard drive
about losing more government-related emails than Clinton. Since she was going after conservatives, "no reasonable prosecutor..." (who didn't want to end up dead) would file charges against her.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
A goodly chunk of those people are also retired folks who worked and paid income tax most of their lives and are now on a small fixed income, drawing down their savings rather than earning taxable income. A lot of the data on both income inequality, debt and taxes paid is explained pretty simply by lifecycle factors. Young adults have no savings, borrow money, earn crappy incomes. Middle age people are paying off debt, saving for retirement, earning decent incomes. Old people are earning very little again but drawing down debt instead of borrowing.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It shows up in that the article is about Indians scamming Americans (who are mostly white). Having said that, Indians would point out that they are brown if anything, not black.
Exactly. The first thing I would do is demand an explanation of what I owe, in writing.
The voters have decided to let social security go bankrupt rather than making some small changes while there's still time, so I can't rely on social security.
The voters were never given a chance. There was no referendum or plebiscite. You do know how this country works right?
Who knows what my daughter my need - just braces if I'm lucky, something MUCH more expensive if I'm not. So I'm living very frugally and saving as much as I can. I go home and make spaghetti while my friends go out to eat.
And then you die from botulism in the spaghetti sauce, leaving your daughter as a ward of the state, and she gets cancer, and you expect us to treat her. Talk about selfish.
Since I do have a slight clue, I don't put the money I'm saving under my mattress, I put it in a mutual fund, where it will grow. That means I own a tiny bit of many large companies - Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, BOA, etc. When P&G makes money selling cereal or AT&T makes money providing phone service, my savings makes a little bit of money. I pray that I can save enough, and earn enough from those savings, to be able to pay my electric bill when I'm 80.
Yes, all you can do is pray. Because you own nothing. You have no say in those companies at all. Even your mutual fund may be as honest as Bernie Madoff's. But it's ok, they'll take your money and you'll live with whatever happens. It isn't like you have a choice, now is it?
For some reason, which you may or may not understand, about 25% of Slashdot commenters think it's perfectly okay to steal from those of us who save. Stealing from AT&T, or P&G, or BOA is fine, they say, those are big companies. Those greedy capitalist stockholders who save for retirement don't need their money! It's fine for me to take it, Ray won't actually need his money that he's been saving. If you can understand that thinking, I bet the Indian scammers think much the same way. Personally, I can't understand it at all, but then again maybe that's because I'm simply not a crook.
Nope, I think you're detached from reality, because it's those folks at AT&T, P&G, BofA, Comcast, Apple, Wells Fargo, and more are happy to steal from us. Have you seen how many settlements for misconduct those companies have made? Or for pollution? Just take the EpiPen...only quadrupled in price for no reason! Or Wells Fargo, accounts opened, manipulations made, customers defrauded.
Check out the work of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. They're very busy.
Another 30% of Slashdot think taking our savings is a great idea, we should pass a law saying anyone who saved has to give their money to people who chose to buy a new smartphone instead of saving. I'm not sure how that reasoning works either. You blow $650 on a new iPhone, to replace the perfectly good iPhone you already have. I keep my cheap Walmart phone and save my money for when my daughter needs something.
Actually, both Apple and Wal-mart are frequently accused of worker abuse and tax shenangians.
But no, I don't think 30% of Slashdot wants iPhones, the last survey I saw had them under 20% in the poll.
Therefore you, with the help of federal agents brandishing guns, should take my money that I saved so you can blow it on some more stupid crap?
Crap may be stupid, but it costs money to dispose of it properly. If you don't want to pay for it, don't make it.
I don't understand that at all, other than I understand that selfishness and self-centeredness exists, and it seems many of these people are horribly, horribly spoiled.
Do you understand delusion, hyperbole, hysteria, and misrepresentation exist? Because at least one of those applies to you.
They're in the top 3% wealthiest people in the world, and whine that sometimes they don't have quite
Well you need to be able to read. That's the case with most tests.
I'm not sure why you think that stretches to whatever your original claim was.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Immorality transcends borders and color. The "so called whites" were one of the biggest swindlers of Indian resources.sorry truth hurts
The point about that the comment was that black people are the victims because they're idiots.