PSA: Current phone scam (notify your oldies)

[Ksandra]

I can't imagine anyone on BG falling for this, but I can imagine (from some past threads) there are those with parents/grandparents who would fall for it, so I wanted to let people know to warn them.

There's a phone scam that's been going on for awhile, but I guess recently it's happening a lot.

The people call claiming the IRS has a warrant for your arrest. Typical stuff about trying to get bank info from you. However, what is unique about it, is the person will have some actual info about you already. They will verify you with your last 4 digits of your social, email address, where you work, etc. Which I think is going to dupe a lot of people into thinking it is real.

Here is a story about it from back in March:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtou...e-out-of-5000/

[6souls]

A variation of this has been happening to University of Minnesota students where people posing as the FBI have been trying to extort money from foreign exchange students.

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2...l_students.php

[Cream Soda]

That's funny. I actually received a call from them a few days ago. They were asking for my brother and said I was listed as his "point of contact". I was impressed, because my brother doesn't even have my phone number; I haven't talked to him in over a year+ on top of that and we live 3,000 miles apart. They couldn't get a hold of him so they tried to get me to get a hold of him. Said he owed money on a small loan or something. I basically told him I had no contact w/ him. I guess I'll get a hold of someone else in the family to warn him.

[gt_killa]

This shit actually happened to a neighbor of mine a few months ago. She told us the story last time we had a neighborhood watch, and needless to say she was scare shitless when they mentioned about IRS out for her arrest..She called her son over to talk with the ppl on the phone and the son basically told them to fuck off. Poor lady, she's 89 years old.

[shidobu]

lol i got a phone call saying that i got a government grant of 6k that i dont have to pay back. THIS DEAL SOUNDED TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. When i started laughing the guy just hung up

[lexie]

That's right. I read reports on this particular scam, too, and the victims claimed that the callers had bits of personal info about them. What's more misleading was the IRS phone number that showed on the victims' caller ID. How was that possible?

[lexie]

Well, I guess I'll just have to remain vigilant. I read an article at Callercenter that scammers are in fact able to spoof caller IDs so we can't trust the machine anymore. I'm alarmed that this is happening. It sounds like these scammers are free to do whatever they want and we are left to just keep defending ourselves.