“You should never hold a candle if you don’t know where it’s been.” - Ian Dury 
I just got a robocall…
Any call not initiated by a real person is a scam. I never answer the phone, and if a voice mail is a robocall, I just delete. And these fucks can’t even leave a proper message, they always start before the beep, so you only get half the message, indicating that it’s a poorly run scam. Free money form Nigerian princes is more believable than these scams.
Even if you half way think it’s an iffy call, google it. Nearly all these scams have been going on so long there are all kinds of articles online documenting them.
I tend to answer them…& immediately hang up. For the BS ones, it’s less effort to do that then get into VM & delete it, & if it’s something remotely legit (ie. headhunter), they’ll call back. If the same # calls right back they tend to be legit; however, whether they’re wanted or not is a different issue.
I am still amazed that people will answer a call from an unknown number.
I put as many people’s numbers into my contact list as I can. If you are not in my contact list, maybe you know someone who is, call them and when I see their identity, I will answer the call. Desperate, almost dead, bleeding out and do not know who to call, but you remember my number and call it from a strange phone.
You probably dead soon.
Caller-ID costs extra on our landline. Unknown callers rate immediate hangups.
I still have an archaic anachronistic land-line. (Remember those?) And an answering mochine. No voice-mail, and no caller ID (which can be spoofed beyond all usefulness anyway).
I just let the answering mochine take all my calls. If someone starts talking and I hear the message and it’s someone I want to hear from then I answer it. I know, it’s so last-century.
I do get certain robocalls that are of interest. My mail-order pharmacy, for example, robocalls me when a prescription has been mailed. What’s interesting is that it can somehow recognize that I have an answering mochine, and waits until the beep to leave its message. That seems awfully clever.
OTOH, I also get more calls than I would expect, often sounding rather ominous, from debt-collectors. They are ALWAYS looking for someone other than me. They are usually robo, and usually don’t wait for the beep. They do seem, AFAICT, to be legitimate aside from having the wrong number and aside from sometimes being kinda nasty.
Mostly I ignore them, and sometimes I’ll get the same call repeatedly over a period of several days. When that happens, I sometimes call them back to tell them they have the wrong number. In those cases, they have always been polite and apologetic and promise to take my number off their list, and I never hear from them again. That is why I think they are actually legit.
OP, wait a minute. You say he asked your name, but then he called you by name.
Did he also ask what your SSN is?
From your conversation with him, as far as it went, what information about you did it seem he already has, and what information was he asking that he didn’t already have?
Did he tell you the number of the SS office in El Paso to call back? (If so, it was certainly a bogus number.) Or did he leave it for you to look up yourself (in which case, that’s of no use to the scammer)?
Did he ask for information other than you name and SSN? You bank account numbers? Your mother’s maiden name? Your birthday?
They had my phone #, they know I can press 1 and my first name. That was it. He didn’t have the chance to ask any more questions. He stressed calling back the El Paso branch but did not leave a number. I don’t like being called during the day and make it quick no matter what, even if it is my gf. Heck, I cancelled Direct TV largely because they would not. stop. calling. me!
I didn’t even know Social Security had a telephone. 
They do send messages by mail though, some so stupid they seem like scams. On my son’s 18th birthday, they mailed us instructions to return any of his earlier SocSec that had been saved instead of spent, along with any interest or capital gains if the funds had been invested, so that they could decide how best to turn those funds over to my son!
Maybe the call was legit. Such calls usually begin with questions the guy already knows the answers to. (The IRS once led with “What is your birthday?” I said — truthfully as the agent should have already known — “It’s today!” The agent: “Don’t get smart with me.”)
SS only calls if it’s part of an ongoing discussion. *Never *from out of the blue.
I did a little SS thing last year. The person on my case definitely called me and left a message. Phone tag ensued.
This “The SSA and the IRS never contact you by phone.” is NOT helpful. They do in some cases. Note that there’s are lines on the 1040 for a phone numbers of 3rd party preparer or paid preparer. If you’re one of those, they might call. That isn’t there for giggles.
True, but it seems like the IRS does not initiate contact by phone. Mrs. Charming and Rested went through an IRS audit for her father last year. The IRS started the audit by mail and requested written submissions from my father-in-law. The addresses to which we submitted the documents matched addresses for the IRS offices that you can confirm readily on the IRS website. My father-in-law listed Mrs. Charming and Rested as an alternate contact on all his submissions but the IRS, to my recollection, the IRS basically never called. The auditors also didn’t provide their phone numbers. If Mrs. Charming and Rested wanted to talk with them, she would call the taxpayer assistance line. Someone would either answer or call her back. It would not be the person who was actually performing the audit, however, and the person returning the call usually didn’t have great information about what the auditor was thinking,
(The good news is we cleared everything up with no deficiency or penalty. It all started when Bank of America misclassified a trustee-to-trustee IRA rollover as a distribution. Grrr.)
As running coach noted, however, they will not cold call you. They will only call as a follow-up to any communication initiated by mail.
I have an answering machine built into my landline phone and voice mail as backup. The vast majority of calls which get through NoMoRobo hang up once they hear the beep (we had a thread on this a while ago) so I don’t even have to erase a message.
Just don’t get confused by all the instructions and send the IRS a video of you masturbating.
Because it might be the Police & Firefighters Association. When they ask for a donation, I yell “No! A policeman shot my Pa!”
I never get tired of that.
That is not the same as “never”, however.
Too many people get into absolutes nowadays.
Another scam we’re seeing locally is someone coming to your door who is supposedly representing an energy saving organization that can help you reduce your utility bills. It’s always a fairly personable young man or woman, often a minority, who tries to play on your liberal tendencies to want to save the environment in order to extract personal information from you. It’s a variation on the “help fund our school trip by subscribing to all these magazines” scam. I just ran one of them off a couple of days ago.
Yes, that’s typical of the Dope. :rolleyes:
OK, they will never call you out of the blue and threaten you. Is that good enough for you?