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Feds Charge 61 People In Indian-Based IRS Phone Scam Case (consumerist.com)
BUL2294 writes: Following the arrests earlier this month in India of call center employees posing as IRS or immigration agents, USA Today and Consumerist are reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice has charged 61 people in the U.S. and India of facilitating the scam, bilking millions from Americans thinking they were facing immediate arrest and prosecution. "According to the indictment (PDF) -- which covers 20 individuals in the U.S. and 32 people and five call centers in India -- since about 2012 the defendants used information obtained from data brokers and other sources to call potential victims impersonating officers from the IRS or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services," reports Consumerist. The report adds: "To give the calls an air of authenticity, the organization was able to 'spoof' phone numbers, making the calls appear to have really come from a federal agency. The callers would then allegedly threaten potential victims with arrest, imprisonment, fines, or deportation if they did not pay supposed taxes or penalties to the government. In instances when the victims agreed to pay, the DOJ claims that the call centers would instruct them to go to banks or ATMs to withdraw money, use the funds to purchase prepaid stored value cards from retail stores, and then provide the unique serial number to the caller. At this point, the operations U.S.-based counterparts would use the serial numbers to transfer the funds to prepaid reloadable cards. The cards would then be used to purchase money orders that were transferred into U.S. bank accounts of individuals or businesses. To make matters worse, the indictment claims that the prepaid debit cards were often registered using personal information of thousands of identity theft victims, and the wire transfers were directed by the organizations using fake names and fraudulent identifications. The operation would then use 'hawalas' -- a system in which money is transferred internationally outside of the formal banking system -- to direct the pilfered funds to accounts belonging to U.S.-based individuals.
Too bad the police don't focus more on real crime. I received dozens of these IRS scam calls, all with thick Indian accents. Everyone I know received them as well. That means there were billions of calls being made. Yet, it took the feds years to do anything about it. And now they arrest 61 people. There is no way that all of those calls were placed by only 61 people.
It's technically trivial to block that type of spoofing. The only hold-back is that there's no penalty for the phone companies that sell to the scammers. Charge their US provider with accessory to the crime, and fine them $100M and this could never happen again. Require that all CLID sent be a valid call-back for the number sent.
Yes, I know that this will be annoying for the outsourced call centers, where HP sells their call center to India and the Indian company calls an American with the CLID of the 1-800 number for HP, so the call looks like it's coming from the US, and if called back, gets to the right queue. But those edge cases don't justify allowing free range for the scammers.
Learn to love Alaska
Old folks get scared and will do what they're told. As will non-tech-savy folk.
The bigger question is, when the hell are the telcos going to be forced to fix the spoofing problem.
HANG UP. It's a scam.
NO!!! Do not hang up on scammers. You should string them along and then find an excuse to put them on hold. I usually tell them to wait while I go get my credit card. Their scams only work if they can quickly weed through reasonably intelligent people, to zero in on the idiots. If we all waste their time, even just a minute or two, the economics no longer work in their favor. So play along, act stupid, and trick them into waiting.
Most of them were probably made by people in India being paid a token amount (who may not have even realised that they weren't working legitimately for the IRS). Those 61 probably represent the ones that actually made the money.
Actually, they understood that, perfectly. Your good scammers need to be intelligent to actually convince people to part with their money, and they need to know that they are running a scam, not actually representing a governmental agency in another country.
After receiving 4 calls in one day from them, I started calling them back. They would ask for my name, and I would remind them that they called my number, and left messages insisting that I owed money to the IRS, so all they needed to do was look at my phone number, and tell me who I was and how much I owed. They would then hang up on me. After about a dozen attempts, they recognized my number, and once answered the phone with a "f*ck you" and immediately hung up. After the 20th time I called them back, in a row (yes, I was bored, and apparently there were 3 or 4 people answering calls on the number they were using at the time, so I started recognizing their voices,) I lied to them and told them that I had just called the IRS, who denied having anything to do with this, and who had directed me to the FBI, who would be calling them, shortly. In a rare moment of "fsck this" the scammer said "Yes sir, you are right, this is a scam. If you fell for it, we were going to get you to send us all of the money in your bank account." I was shocked by this, and also excited, because I was recording the call (I'm in Virginia, a 1 party consent state.) So I drew him out, and he explained to me that he wasn't worried about the law coming to get him, because "we have been doing this for years. They never catch us. They never going to catch us." He then asked me, politely, if I would please stop calling them. I told him to stop calling my number, if he didn't want to keep hearing from me, dozens of times for every call they made to me, and he agreed.
They did call me back the next day (darned scammers, not keeping a good Do Not Call List,) but, after that, it was over a month before they put me back into the regular rotation.
Yes, I still have the recording. I had plans to post it on youtube to shame the government into some kind of action, but, when I looked it up online, I found that this was so well known for so many years that it was clear that the scammer was essentially right... no one was coming for them.
This news article made me smile. I kind of hoped they got the "they never going to catch us" guy.