Inside the IRS Phone Scam targeting Americans

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Barbara
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Inside the IRS Phone Scam targeting Americans

Post by Barbara »

Sure enough, it turns out that Western India is a veritable factory of scam operations all aimed at wheedling money out of American citizens, taking advantage of general ignorance. Or the psychological vulnerability of recent immigrants from the subcontinent.

Here is the story of 2 youngsters who signed up to impersonate IRS agents. It's interesting to note how much they got swept up into the predatory mentality. After only a short time working a call center, the 2 Indians were scheming how to start their own 'scam business'.

THANE, India: Betsy Broder, who tracks international fraud at the Federal Trade Commission, was in her office in Washington last summer when she got a call from two Indian teenagers. ...

Babu was Jayesh Dubey, a skinny 19-year-old... He told her that he was working in a seven-story building and that everyone there was engaged in the same activity: impersonating Internal Revenue Service officials and threatening Americans, demanding immediate payment to cover back taxes. ...

As it happened, the United States government had been tracking this India-based scheme since 2013, a period during which Americans, many of them recent immigrants, have lost $100 million to it. ...

Their claim to have brought down the centre is unfounded, according to Indian and American investigators, who said that the raid in Thane was carried out entirely by the local police, without assistance from American officials. The Thane police said their informant was not employed by the swindlers. The raid was international news, and in the weeks that followed, the number of fraudulent I.R.S. calls to Americans dropped 95 percent, according to the Better Business Bureau. ...

But those who believe that the drop is permanent should consider this: In the weeks after Mr. Poojary and Mr. Dubey left the centre, several lucrative job opportunities were presented to them. Each involved a phone scheme targeting Americans, they said. There was.... a low-interest loan scam, in which people were asked to deposit $1,000 as proof of income. There was a tech scam, which warned Americans that their computer had been infected by a virus, and an American Express scam, which involved gathering personal information to break through security barriers on online accounts."

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/176947 ... -Americans

Last edited by Maria on Tue 13 June 2017 4:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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