Scam bots are funny. · 7:09pm Jun 8th, 2017
This is a call I’ve gotten several times. It’s always in really bad female text-to-speech.
Hello this call is officially a final notice from IRS Internal Revenue Service. The reason of this call is to inform you that. IRS is filling a lawsuit on your name because. You had tried to do a fraud with the IRS Internal Revenue Service and we are taking a legal action and we are issuing an arrest warrant on your name. To get more information regarding this case file. Just call us back on our department number 815-242-6102. I will repeat it. 815-242-6102. Thank you.
There are no typos in that quote. It is exactly what the call says. Yes, including “reason of this call”, “filling a lawsuit”, and “tried to do a fraud”.
Scammers, I can accept that you make claims that don’t even remotely resemble how our government organizations function, or that you don’t know things like “the IRS doesn’t arrest people”. Most Americans probably don’t know any of that, either.
But come on.
Learn basic English grammar first. This sounds like something a third grader would write to trick their parents.
Believe it or not, but this is actually a feature, not a bug.
The basic idea, such as it is, is to scare off anybody smart enough to imminently or, worse for the scammer, down the line see through the deception.
Thus leaving maximum energy/time for targeting the idiots, the weak and fools they’re aiming for in the first place, while minimizing time wasted on uncooperative marks.
Really damn cynical, but it’s one of those things that explain quite a lot once you’ve heard it.
Wait. Did you, or did you not "tried to do a fraud with the IRS" ?
4564629
Your avatar and username are beautiful.
4564670
Why, thank you.
Edit* Alas, the vampire potoo had it’s little speech-bubble saying: ‘Blûd!’ cut of by the recent change to circle avatars, but most of the
dorknessmagic’s still there.I’ve gotten the same call, and it made me laugh. Obvious scam is obvious.
orig05.deviantart.net/e656/f/2015/208/f/3/speedpaint_54___flim_and_flam_by_kp_shadowsquirrel-d9316m8.png
>tfw you try to do a fraud but the IRS Internal Revenue Service issues an arrest warrant on your name :C
Yeah, I get that one on a semi-regular basis. I wasn’t sure the first time I got it since I only half-listen to calls like that. However, I was pretty sure that if someone was going to arrest me that the notification would be either by letter or, you know, an actual person on the phone. Since I’ve gotten the same one about once every five months since I feel confident in my assumption.
I had something similar happen to me a few years ago, but with far more annoying results. I got my computer taken hostage by an announcement that I had to pay the IRS/MPAA/MLP/whoever-it-was a certain amount of money to in order to pay fines for illegal downloads of music and porn. (It even had Obama pointing at me accusingly.)
Now that I have virus protection, I don’t get 💩 messages like that anymore.
Tried to do a fraud. Much money. So sneaky.
I once had a scammer call and tell me he worked for Microsoft, and my computer has a virus that only he can fix. I asked him how the hell he would know the condition of my computer, and he answered with some nonsense, again trying to emphasize he was calling from Microsoft. Once I told him I’ve been working with computers for over twenty years and he was, therefore, full of shit he got scared and hung up. If only they all could react like that.
As ridiculous and obvious as that IRS scam is, there are otherwise intelligent people who do fall for it. I'm inclined to have little sympathy for someone that naive, but we all have our weak points.
4565610
I've gotten the "I'm from Microsoft" scam calls as well. As a professional computer programmer it is fun to mess with them by asking technical questions they have no hope of being able to answer. Though my favourite thing to do, other than just hanging up to not waste the time, is to respond with "Why is Microsoft calling to help me with my Apple device?" (I AM a PC, not a Mac, user but it's fun to mess with their little scammer minds.)
4565610
I got one of those once, and the call went something like this:
Scammer: "You have a virus on your computer."
Me; "Which one?"
Scammer: "How many do you have?"
Me: "A couple dozen."
Scammer: "What do you use them all for?"
Me: "I'm using one as a doorstop." (which was true)
Scammer: <hangs up>
Another time when one of them called, I pretended it was a phone sex hotline. He hung up pretty quick.