Officer Julie Smith’s synthesized voice left a message on my message center this morning. She said I or my retained attorney of record should contact her at (202) 241-8730, or face legal action. The robot did not mention anyone by name, or give a case number.
I was asleep at the time the call came in, but my wife listened to it, and freaked out. She wants me to report the scammers. Anybody have a clue how I can do this?
TIA.
Here is a webpage from the Federal Trade Commission at which you can report such things.
Confirmation that it is a fake I.R.S. collector. Same name, same phone(y) number.
I’ve gotten a similar “call us or you’re going to jail” messages on my answering machine, but with a faintly-Indian-accented person with a generic “John Smith” type of name. Guess the talent pool of Indians who can do plain American accents is thin if they’re using synthesized voices now.
I got one of these as well. One of the phone numbers they use is from a website for iMUS which is supposedly a technical support company, with a lot of broken English. When I called the number a woman with an Indian accent answered and claimed to be from the IRS. When I threatened to report her to the attorney general, she freaked out and hung up.
Geez, what are you guys doing wrong to get audits?
I get lots of weird calls, mostly telling me I’ve won free cruises.
What gets me is where they have the same area code and even exchange as me, but the caller ID is formatted with spaces so it looks like a call from Europe.(i.e. 90-55-551-212) I guess that’s a caller ID with an Indian accent.
I would so ask my brother to run across the street to ask his buddy to call the stupid number back … he happens to be a lawyer 
I would call back myself, but I am just a paralegal.
It reallly is a shame that you scared her off.
I don’t blame you at all. But I’m thinking it would be great if someone could try and string some of these people along for a while - at least long enough to find out what their scam is and maybe try to get them involved to the point where you can give our authorities some info about them.
Seems to me that if so many of them are using broken English, they must think we are real stupid (and unfortunately many of us are stupid), or else maybe they are just trying to target the elderly or other people who might not have a lot of defenses.
But these sound like people who are real evil crooks and I would very much love to see us find a way to throw their asses in jail.
Unfortunately, if you have followed similar scams in the past, by the time they get to the point where they just don’t care if people know what they’re up to and hang up on them, they must feel real confident that we can’t hurt them.
Maybe that’s because they have organized things to have some stupid people on their end who will take the fall cuz everything is in their name.
Does anyone know of a web site where we can report this sort of thing and where the relatives of vulnerable people (like the elderly) can be warned? Along with a warning, I’d love to see some info posted about what the best thing would be for us to do to try and get back at these bastards.
I apologize if I insinuated that Kaylasdad99 did anything wrong. Kaylasdad99 surely did not do anything that I probably wouldn’t do as well if I was woken up in the middle of the night. In fact, calling people in the middle of the night seems like it might be an integral part of their scam. People are not at the top of their game when suddenly woken up in the middle of the night. I’m pretty sure I would have done the very same thing or something very stupid if they called me.
People who will pick up their phone and answer it in the middle of the night are likely to have loved ones and they want to be available to them in case they need help in the middle of the night. So callous to use our love for our parents against us!
Perhaps one answer is that we need a better system than our current “Caller ID” system. That can be considered to be just another ripoff. That one is initiated by the phone companies that get us to pay them a few dollars a month to ID a caller. Then, if we want to defeal “Caller ID”, we can pay another few dollars a month to be invisible to Caller ID. That just goes on and on and it’s not really effective.
What if your loved one or elderly parent is out of town and they need to talk with you? In many cases, “Caller ID” will not help you. I’m thinking we need a new system that is more effective and that only costs a few dollars a month and you only pay once.
It’s a real shame that these crooks don’t really care if people try to put them in jail. Seems like they can always stay one step ahead of the law. Operating outside of this country is a very powerful attribute. That makes it very difficult to get to them.
This kind of stuff really ticks me off because these people use our vulnerabilities (like our love for our parents) against us to rip us off. Dang! Remember the days of “Drawing and Quartering”? Sigh. I know we can’t bring back those kinds of punishments. But still, the scammers of this world just never give up. Every step we take to defeat them, seems like they can take several steps to stay ahead of us.
There are so few of these people that ever get caught. Seems like they make billions and billions of dollars from their scams and we only put one or two of them into jail once every ten or twenty years.
Oh well, surely there must be a way for us to keep ourselves safe from these “most callous” kinds of scams.
They use our love for our parents against us and scam us out of a ton of money. Then they stay ahead of us by scamming our parents when they become elderly and cannot protect themselves.
Doesn’t that just make you fiercely angry?
It wasn’t in the middle of the night. It was around noon. I work nights. And no, you didn’t imply that I had done anything wrong.
At least, I can’t be bothered to look hard enough to find any such implication.
We know all about the IRS scan and I’ve read articles about people who fell for the one in the OP so we know about them also.