I don't get an IRS one, I do get a call from the "pre-trial services" department "in conjunction with" some county I used to live in, and they claim I have a charge against me, they even provide a docket number. Then it turns out they're trying to collect on a fake payday loan debt and aren't associated with anyone. You can tell almost right away they're lying, but I prefer to just draw out all the initial claims to get them to admit each one. Then at the end they passive aggressively claim that a charge will be filed against me if I don't resolve the issue.
My favorite are the online pharmacy guys trying to sell me viagra. They are always Indian and I always speak back to them in Hindi telling them I would buy some if they can send their mom over for me to try it on. :grin:
I never answer calls I'm not familiar with. I guess this is why I wondering how you all are getting so many spam calls on your phones? I rarely even get any calls from suspicious numbers.
I don't understand why these things are so hard to stop? I would think impersonating an IRS official is a federal offense (along with fraud, etc), and the FBI or whomever has these people's phone numbers. I wouldn't think it would be *that* hard to trace and shut down?
They are based in India, so hard to setup extradition. I'd guess all those call centers based there can easily be turned around into a scamming operation. The numbers are spoofed, so you can't really do anything as how our telecommunications infrastructure is setup. I mean I've received phone calls from myself with a robo-call scam on the other line. Personally, I just stopped picking up any calls and set my phone to silent. I get about 4 of these a day. Sadly the best way to put these guys out of business is for no one to fall for their scam.
It just seems that if they are stealing millions of dollars from taxpayers, and especially if they are doing it under the guise of *being* the US Government, the actual US Government would work with India to stop it. I don't know specifically the IRS ones, but many of these things are willing to leave messages and have you call them back. Not exactly familiar with how our telecom infrastructure is set up, but I'd think the government could easily kill access to those numbers so you couldn't make outbound calls to them. Even if there's a whack-a-mole element to it, they can't have an unlimited number of US numbers to receive calls at. Or perhaps I don't understand all the mechanics of it.
The guy's going to post his method for this when he gets home - I can't wait! Do people here know how to set up something like this? I've been hit by a wave of this previously, with the local police department shown on caller id and given as the call back number; I double checked it by hanging up and calling/discussing it with the local police to not fall for it. A friend ended up giving them his bank account information, but didn't have anything stolen luckily and has since taken measures with his bank to prevent problems. The way these operations are set up though, is *sometimes* sad for the call receiver and maker; since call centers are huge businesses in India, in some cases, ordinary joes are hired on to make calls for what they think is a legitimate business and call center. They have no understanding of what they're talking about e.g. what the IRS is, or what information/scam/fraud they're telling the call receivers. The people who set up the fake call centers, buy/steal the contact information of potential victims are the real dicks here, but don't present faces/voices to build an investigation on. Callers typically stick to a script that they don't understand (source: I worked at a legitimate one for insurance sales in India). Of course this is only in *some* cases; other callers do have malicious intent. In mine and friend's cases, I figured out that the callers got our information from a University public directory that had names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, mailing addresses, office building and room numbers etc listed on. Luckily the calls stopped after removing that information from there. The University, to their credit, took action to make the directory private after enough complaints. I still get the stupid cruise offers though, even after reporting the phone numbers to the national spam database. Luckily Google phones show me that the call is spam while it's ringing and gives me the option to not receive future calls from the number.
The Governments did start working together on the problem in the second half of last year; I guess it's harder to actually trace it back to specific perpetrators. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/world/asia/india-call-centers-fraud-americans.html