I know two people who received those calls.

One guy called me to ask if it sounded like a scam.They wanted payment within hours or the said the police would be knocking on the door at any moment.

It was weird that he thought for a moment it might be legit.

I got a call (actually a v-mail) from someone stating I was being sued by the IRS. There was a follow-up call (which I heard as v-mail) stating that if I did not respond I could be arrested for failure to appear. I called the IRS and they said it was a scam, and that I am in good standing as far as taxes are concerned.

I’ve gotten to three calls, two went to voice mail. Third one I asked if he knew my uncle “Elliot Hxxxxx”, who was an IRS agent/auditor. He hung up (he had a Bangladesh accent).

Oh when they ask for payment be made with iTunes gift cards it sort of gives it away.

@Call_Me_Jay People, particularly in Amerika, have been brainwashed to comply with authority instantly and without question under threat of violence up to and including death. The troubling Louise Ogborn case is a perfect example of the phenomenon, in which a seemingly sane person sexually assaulted an innocent person simply because someone identifying as a police officer said so.

This is very sad. The elderly are especially vulnerable. A “little old lady” might be easily intimidated, race off to Western Union, and wire money to an unknown recipient.

I’ve said this more times than I can recall; I’ll say it again – the IRS doesn’t call people, it sends notices.

Even when you BEG them to call you they don’t call you.

Yeah I’ve gotten a couple of those calls.

Not this specific one, but my FIL thank goodness, called us when he was about to run out and buy a debit card to pay his back taxes he was informed he owed.

When I opened my business a company posed as a government agency saying we have to buy EEOC posters from them.

Yes…I had about three or four calls a month.

Tell them they can collect the money in person at another address and then tell the police.

Tell them they can collect the money in person at another address and then tell the police

There is nobody local involved. They tell you to put money in some form they can access from far away…Western Union, credit card, iTunes card, etc.

I’ve received a couple of these calls.

Mostly, I hang up. They left a couple messages on voicemail, as well.

When I used to get these calls, I’d always take the opportunity to talk to them about the benefits of unionization and try to give them contact information for the IWW. The people who make these calls are the same ones who do call support for big corporations; the call centres will take any customers, legal or illegal, and pay off the cops to ignore complaints. My talks about unionizing, and how they can use it to get a lot more money out of the bosses, usually get cut off at some point, probably by a supervisor listening in at random to calls.

Sadly, I no longer get any of these calls. At all. I went from several a day to none at all. I think I’ve been blacklisted. :(

I get them all the time. My favorite was from Jerry, who informed me that if I didn’t respond, the “judicial magistrate” would call me in. Up to that point his voicemail had been doing so much better than the others. If you’re gonna scam me, at least do so by pretending to have the authority if actual US entities!

(On the other hand, I’m glad these things are generally flawed in at least one way—makes it less likely they’ll be able to persuade people who don’t know otherwise.)

@Call_Me_Jay LOL “This is the IRS, you must charge up the Judicial Magistrate’s iTunes card…” Makes me want to talk to someone in law enforcement about some way to pretend to go along with an untraceable payment, but list one that is traceable. Seems like if you had someone who cared at the police or FBI, and you could get the scammers to call back, they could probably figure out where it came from if they cared enough.

I dunno, sometimes I just don’t get how the forces of retarded abuse work. I’d think that the authorities would be more interested in at least winning some PR points by shutting down more of the scummy people that the public would really like to see get nailed. I guess the problem is that their priorities are too messed up to focus on that.

@Zaku As I mentioned, people have tracked these callers, and the calls originate at the same call centres in Pakistan and India which large corporations use for call support. Anyone can hire them. They don’t care whether you’re IBM or a scam artist: if you have money, you can hire the call centres. Complaints to the police there are completely ignored, probably because they’ve been paid off. Nothing short of a drone strike would stop them.

The phone companies could stop them overnight, but why would they? They’re turning a profit off the activity and it costs them nothing.

@SmashTheState Oh, Indian call centers… thanks for the added info. Hmm I’m too tired to think of what makes sense to do about that, but please don’t drone strike them, even though it would be hilarious from a certain depraved point of view.

I think whoever used to have my phone number, inadvertently gave it away to some shady organization. I have gotten hundreds of these calls in the past year and have blocked every number they come from. It’s not just IRS scams either. I’ve gotten Credit Card scams, vacation, home security, student loans—you name it! I have no idea how to stop them and adding myself to the “do not call” list does nothing. Every time I get a call from an unknown number, I Google it to see if it’s a scam (800notes.com is a good resource) and then block.

^^^ The cruelest of all is the Grandma Scam.

A man with a young-ish voice calls an elderly lady and says, “This is your favorite grandson!” The woman responds with, “Hi Billy,” or “Is this David?,” thus feeding all the information the caller needs. The man then says that he’s in trouble but can’t ask his parents for help. He also begs the woman not to tell anyone that he’d called; he’s too embarrassed, plus the family would be furious to know that he’s hitting-up his grandmother. The lady rushes off to wire money.

Does this scam work? Absolutely. One of my clients sent $8,000 to her “grandson,” who claimed to have been gravely injured in Spain. Of course, her real grandson had never visited Spain or left the U.S. at all.