"Julie Smith," a computerized voice purporting to be an officer of the Internal Revenue Service, claims "The issue at hand is extremely time sensitive. Do not disregard this message and do return the call before we take any action against you." And the curious close, "Goodbye and take care."
"Julie Smith," a computerized voice purporting to be an officer of the Internal Revenue Service, claims "The issue at hand is extremely time sensitive. Do not disregard this message and do return the call before we take any action against you." And the curious close, "Goodbye and take care."
Report the Calls to the real IRS here:
•report the incident to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at 800-366-4484.
•You can also file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission at FTC.gov. Add "IRS Telephone Scam" to the comments in your complaint.
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Do consider maybe getting a call blocking device or phone.. You can google them and many are around $60.00 or so.
This is a Pakistan or India based IRS scam. Do not fall for it. The IRS does not initiate any legal action via phone.
Read http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/press/press_tigta-2014-03.htm
As general background information, here are a few things you can do:
1) Report it to TIGTA under http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/contact_report_scam.shtml especially if you have become a victim (lost money, gave personal information etc.). You can also file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission at ftc.gov/complaint (include “IRS Telephone Scam" in your complaint). This way you can also help the government establish specific fraud patterns.
2) Help kill their phone lines. The scammers use Voice over IP lines (e.g. magicJack (Ymax corporation)) to make it seem as if they are calling from the US. This is always against these companys' terms of service and can lead to immediate termination of their contract and blocking of their IP addresses for future attempts to register. Do a reverse look up of their telephone number (e.g. www.whitepages.com) to identify the Voice over IP provider and report it to the company and or law enforcement (local police and/or state attorney general)
3) If you are really annoyed: call or write to your representative in Congress. As these scams happen all over the country maybe this will trigger a reaction and provide US law enforcement agencies with the political backing and the resources they need to work in India and Pakistan together with local authorities (it can happen, read: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/ex-call-cen ... mmission-320427). A US task force has already been set up in Jamaica to nab scammers there (see http://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/library/reports/cornerstone/cornerstone7-1.pdf). You can use the following template for your letter (more powerful!) or email:
This is really getting out of hand to the number of times from different phone numbers I am called only to be told that I owe the IRS some random Amt. of money and that I will have a warrant out for my arrest if I do not wire at my local CVS pharmacy or my local WalMart immediately. Where is our gov. When you really need them. They have succeeded in scamming my 85 year old mother out of $3,500 a few years back. We called local law enforcement as well as the Ohio Attroney General and nothing other then it being put on file could be done about it. That's BS and our fed government needs to put a stop to this or to help educate ppl on especially elderly on what to watch for. The FBI feels this is probably to boring and to small of potatoes for them to persue. This is why America has lost its faith in our govt. protecting us citizens. This person knew the address zip code and street that the I RS is actually located.