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Thursday, August 11, 2016

IRS SCAM- What It Sounds Like


The IRS scam has received much publicity over the last year or so. Recently, an Iowa radio station took a call from an IRS scammer and recorded eleven minutes of his pitch. If you have the time, you should listen to it.

This scammer (it actually was a team of two) stuck to his script. But the key was that he tried to isolate the victim until he received his money. The victim was told that the process would take an hour. The victim had to follow “rules and regulations” to “resolve” his case. They included:



·         The victim needed to stay on the phone, he could not hang up.

·         The scammer claimed to require payment through the EFTPS, a federal payment system that allows taxpayers to pay their taxes to the federal government from their bank accounts (www.eftps.gov).

·         The victim should not disclose the case with anyone, family, friends, co-workers, because there is a danger that he will lose his job.

 Other scammers may use slightly different techniques, but it is clear that the scammer wanted control of the victim by requiring the victim to stay on the phone and wanted to isolate the victim by convincing him not to tell anyone. The scammer claimed to use a legitimate federal funds transfer program for payment. While the recording did not reveal the actual procedures that the scammer demanded, clearly the money was not going to the federal government.

To listen to the recording, go to,

KSIB, Creston, Iowa:




An additional write up of the recording,

WHO TV, Des Moines, Iowa:







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