Published in the March 18-31, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Ralph Chellino
Ralph Chellino
Recently, I was checking my voice mail and listened to this recorded message from someone with a male’s authoritative voice:
“This is a very dire issue. This is the IRS. Please return this call immediately or within the next 24 hours, or there will be penalties, consequences, and/or you will be arrested.”
I knew this was a scam because my sister and two people in my office encountered this same situation recently and were confronted by this person. I erased the message.
The next morning, I was sleeping soundly but awakened at 6:01 a.m. I wondered who it might be calling at that time in the morning, with a concern it might be a family situation, I picked up the phone and saw it was a 415 area code I didn’t recognize, but I assumed it might be from the Bay Area. I heard the same recorded message from “the IRS” that I had heard previously but even more ominous.
A short while later, I called the phone number. I reached a man who spoke in a Southern accent, maybe from Louisiana. He told me, “Yes, you are in very serious trouble and we need to send someone out there to collect the penalty fee.”
Now I’m really fuming, so I say to the guy, “Listen, I know you’re a fraud, I’m going to report this to the Morgan Hill Police Department as soon as they open up at 8 o’clock.”
Click. He hangs up the phone. So I’m now fuming and smoke is coming out of my ears because of this fraud. I call again 20 minutes later. I get a busy signal. I call back another 20 minutes later, and I get connected but I heard a blank sound like it connected to another line.
At 8 a.m., I called the Morgan Hill Police Department’s non-emergency line. The person who answered told me that it’s a scam going on all over Morgan Hill. According to the police, these scam artists are working all over the world, and law enforcement is able to trace them back to other countries.
The public needs to know that this is a scam going on out there so that they won’t fall for these predators. With this threatening shake down, they particularly target elderly people who might be living on a fixed income and are afraid of being arrested.
If you get a phone message like I did, do not respond to them or send them money. This is fraud.
The real IRS will send you a letter first if you owe money. They will not call you up on the phone really early in the morning with a threatening call demanding you pay a fine or they will arrest you.
