Tom Ruscha IRS phone scam finally may be fizzling out | Page 2

But it's been a month or more since I've heard any complaints. Reports to the inspector general and
the BBB are way down.
That's because some of the people accused of making the calls have been locked up. Early last month,
authorities in India raided a call center and charged 70 people with fraud. On Oct. 27, U.S. authorities
announced that 56 others had been indicted; some of them in the states, along with five call centers in
India.
"We are encouraged that our investigation, which resulted in the announced law enforcement action
in late October, has had a significant impact on this criminal activity," inspector general's
spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar told me.
At the peak of the scam, more than 30,000 calls were reported to the inspector general in a single
week. That was down to about 1,000 in one recent week.
People still are being ripped off, though, and the inspector general recently learned of 40 people who
lost money, Kraushaar said.
"It is extremely important that people remain vigilant and remember to hang up on callers who claim
to be IRS or Treasury employees and make threatening calls demanding immediate payment," she
said.
In about the past month, the Better Business Bureau's Scam Tracker website has received 91 reports
of tax fraud, compared to 489 the previous month. While those figures include all types of tax scams,
the vast majority are IRS scam calls.
"We are pleased with the drop and are looking forward to the day when we aren't getting any IRS tax
scams reported," said Kelsey Owen, communications and public affairs director for the Better
Business Bureau office that covers eastern Pennsylvania.
There are variations of these scam calls. Sometimes the callers are men. Sometimes they are women.
Some calls are live while others at least start as robocalls. Callers often instruct victims not to tell
anyone about what's going on and to remain on their cellphone while they are buying the prepaid
cards to pay their supposed debt. The callers try to sound official, sometimes offering badge numbers
and case numbers. But their foreign accents often give them away.
In addition to the arrests, technology also played a role in reducing the number of calls getting
through.
As I reported in a recent column, a new technique being developed by phone and technology
companies to block illegal robocalls stopped a substantial number of these scam calls during a test.
While this is all good news, I fear the fraud could catch a second wind. Schemes as profitable as this
often morph into new ones. The Better Business Bureau also warned of that.
"We know from past experience that scammers are opportunists," Emma Fletcher, manager of the
BBB's Scam Tracker, said in a news release last month. "Hopefully this crew won't be stealing from
anyone again for a long while. But we will be keeping an eye on incoming scam reports so we can alert
consumers what the 'next big thing' in scams turns out to be."