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Oh no! My ssn is being suspended!

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Eekamouse

Senior Member
What is the name of your state? Ca
I am so sick of getting these fake calls from spammers. I get them at least twice a weekday but never on the weekends. Weird. Why can't the FCC or the cops or anybody do anything to stop these jerks? Blocking the number doesn't help because they just call from a different number. Anybody else getting these aggravating calls?
 


quincy

Senior Member
What is the name of your state? Ca
I am so sick of getting these fake calls from spammers. I get them at least twice a weekday but never on the weekends. Weird. Why can't the FCC or the cops or anybody do anything to stop these jerks? Blocking the number doesn't help because they just call from a different number. Anybody else getting these aggravating calls?
I haven't heard of that particular scam caller. Have you contacted your state AG's Consumer Protection division?
 
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CdwJava

Senior Member
My wife has gotten three of these alleged Social Security calls in the last few weeks, and I have gotten one. We both just hang up.

To answer the question about why nothing can be done, they tend to be lesser attempts at crimes and are often shielded through a series of dummy numbers and IP addresses such as to make it exceedingly difficult for local agencies to investigate, not to mention that most of them are from other states or countries. The feds often require a specific dollar loss before they will get involved, and these attempts are often zero loss. Those that DO result in losses rarely ever get into the high dollar amounts to get the feds interested. Sometimes these scams come at a time when the feds or the state (AG here) are focusing on one or more of these things and you can get lucky.

At the UC where I work we get several assorted scams each week. The most prolific and profitable one seems to target Chinese students (from the PRC) where the caller alleges to be from a Chinese law enforcement agency and demands some sort of payment ... in the form of gift cards, green dot cards, etc. Remarkably, a great number of the foreign students fall for this and send the money!

These scams are a scourge and there is no easy answer to resolve them. The best most agencies can do is to try and educate the public that these are out there and don't fall for it.
 

LdiJ

Senior Member
There are a couple of different IRS scams that are going on out there too, and the people making the calls are vicious.
 

CdwJava

Senior Member
I've heard tales of some being very aggressive. They count on a small percentage buying into the fear they create and caving in to pay them in gift cards. GIFT CARDS!
 

bcr229

Active Member
If I'm not busy I waste their time until they hang up on me. I figure while I have them on the line they're not scamming someone else.

I get the extended car warranty calls a lot. My commuter is a 20 year old Camry with 300k miles. For some reason they won't sell me a warranty.
 

cbg

I'm a Northern Girl
I got the SSN call the other day, and my husband got it as well a few months ago. I don't answer any calls from a number I don't recognize and I have "visual voice mail" which converts voice to text so that I can see if it's a "real" call or not. Doesn't stop the calls (I block number after number) but it does lessen the aggravation.
 

Mass_Shyster

Senior Member
Although it's often entertaining to engage them, I've stopped doing that since the callers have turned to violence.

They demand money, and threaten that the police will show up with a warrant if you don't pay. When you refuse, they call your local PD non-emergency number and say that there's a person with a gun in your house. They spoof your phone number on the caller-id, so it appears to the police that you actually placed the call. The next thing you know, the SWAT team shows up at your door with a report of an armed perp. Things can go vary badly from that point on.

I find it easier to simply hang up.

Here's one example:

https://www.fredericksburg.com/news/crime_courts/scammer-takes-a-swat-at-culpeper-man/article_99ec163c-fda7-11e4-bb44-eb5f34f57308.html
and another

https://consumerist.com/2016/02/11/diabolical-irs-phone-scammers-call-swat-team-tell-victim-theyre-there-to-collect/
 

cbg

I'm a Northern Girl
A few years ago, the university I work for, you all know the one, the one that serves as an icon for excellence, discovered that they had made a very, very bad mistake in the handling of the employee-funded life insurance. You probably heard about it; it made the national news. The university worked directly with the IRS in correcting the error but it was a long and drawn out process. We had information up on our intranet explaining to employees what to do, should they be individually contacted by the IRS that the numbers didn't match, and had form letters, approved by the IRS and our legal department, that they could print off and fill out to submit if necessary.

While we were dealing with this fiasco and were actually only a few weeks away from wrapping the whole thing up, I took a call from a woman who was in frantic and terrified tears. She had gotten one of these spam phone calls telling her that IRS agents were on their way to her house to arrest her if she didn't provide an immediate payment. Naturally under the circumstances, she related that call to the issue with the life insurance and begged me to immediately email her a letter that would explain to these agents what had happened, with a promise of when payment would be made and even better, could she call me back when they got there so I could explain? I had a very hard time getting her to understand that (first) this was a fairly well known scam and (second) the nature of the error meant that she had OVERpaid and was due a refund!
 
Many scammers have moved to the internet. Phishing e-mails, bogus Microsoft service calls. I've seen most of them and there is a thriving community devoted to playing their game.

My favorite story involves a Nigerian scam whereby you receive an e-mail saying that a large sum of US dollars was taken from a corrupt government official, shipped out of Nigeria and is now in a warehouse in Amsterdam. The sum is always in the multi millions. but the problem was that the cash had been sprayed with a special ink that obscured the wording on the notes making them unusable. The good news is that the scammers have found a chemical that will remove the ink, but they need a few thousand dollars to buy the chemical because it is so rare and only available in Holland.
One of the scambaiters accepted the challenge, contacted the scammers and arranged to meet them in Amsterdam, promising to bring the money needed for the chemical in cash.
The scambaiter arranged the meeting at a cafe in Amsterdam, but the scammers didn't know that it had a video camera which was live streamed to the internet. At the appointed time the scammer turned up and took a seat. After a few hours of waiting he got up and left. A short time later the scambaiter received an e-mail asking why he didn't show, to which the scambaiter replied that he had, and met the scammer, who he was able to describe in great detail courtesy of the live video feed. The scambaiter then said that they enjoyed a lunch and when he went to the restroom he left the cash with the scammer, but on his return both the scammer and cash had vanished. He now wanted to know where his money was. :devilish:
 

Just Blue

Senior Member
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