A Scammer Convinced Me the IRS Was Throwing Me in Jail

Lauren Oak was watching her young children, babysitting her infant nephew and caring for her wheelchair-bound father when the phone rang and brought on the scariest moment of her life.

“They said they were from the IRS, that I owed $16,000, that a warrant had been issued for my arrest, and that the sheriffs would be by within 24 hours to pick me up,” said Oak, a Long Island mom. “They told me to make sure I arranged for someone to bail me out…I started hyperventilating. I don’t think I’ve ever been that hysterical.”

“It was really terrifying. I kept thinking, ‘what will I do with the kids?” she said.

Oak hung up abruptly with the caller, and reached her brother, a New York City cop, who assured her she wasn’t going to jail.

“He said it was a scam, but I said, ‘No, it’s not a scam! They knew all this about me’” she said. “They said my license and passport were going to be revoked for 10 years.”

It was a scam.

How It Works

The IRS has issued several warnings this year about a “pervasive telephone scam” that is “sophisticated and aggressive.”

“Potential victims are threatened with deportation, arrest, having their utilities shut off, or having their driver’s licenses revoked. Callers are frequently insulting or hostile — apparently to scare their potential victims,” says the IRS in its most recent warning.

However bad that sounds, Pindrop Security says things are even worse. The Internet security firms, which maintains a database of phone number fraud activity, estimated that 450,000 people were targeted by the scam in March. Pindrop says the scammers are using an inexpensive IP telephone service to make calls appear as if they are coming from inside the U.S. The callers are actually in India, the firm says. This scam has caused 10 times more complaints than any other IRS phone scam the firm has ever tracked.

Criminals try to scare victims and then talk them into wiring money, allegedly to settle the tax debt and avoid jail time. Victims are told to use a GreenDot MoneyPak card or to wire money to a PayPal account.

Pindrop also had an employee intentionally “fall” for the scam to examine the criminal techniques, which are quite bold. In that call, the operator tries to convince the employee that he owes money for overseas transactions related to mutual fund investments.

“When there are overseas transactions under your name, you need to pay the full portion of the transaction fees to the IRS Department, which you never did. They have investigated each and every thing, and they have filed a lawsuit complaint against your name,” an operator tells the faux victim, according to a transcript on Pindrop’s website. “In a few days, the arrest warrant will also be issued under your name.”