Posted on 03/31/2019 4:25:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
But a new wrinkle in this venerable scam was recently reported. In this one, recipients of a call are told that their Social Security number has been suspended due not to their own actions but to more general "suspicious activity."
Instead of being given another number to call, the victims are told to simply press 1, and they'll be connected with a Social Security agent. Instead, they are connected to a fraudulent agent, who may ask them to verify their Social Security number. Once they verify it, the fraudster has it. Fines and bank account numbers are part of this one, too.
Unfortunately, Social Security fraud is all too frequently perpetrated against senior citizens. Most senior citizens rely on Social Security for at least part of their income, and many rely on it for a sizable percentage of it. They may be very frightened of a possible suspension of the number and hence the benefit.
Senior citizens also often don't realize how easy it is to imitate even an agency of the U.S. government. In the past, scam artists have set up phone numbers with 202 area codes (the one used in Washington, D.C.) and email accounts with ssa.gov as part of the address -- which is part of the actual online address of the SSA. They have set up fake SSA websites that look very convincing.
This time of year, there may be a third wrinkle. Tax returns, refunds, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), another federal agency, are in the minds, computers, and mailboxes of many people. Senior citizens and the rest of the population might be more likely to believe that someone from the U.S. government is actually contacting them about suspicious activity during this period than any other.
(Excerpt) Read more at fool.com ...
I think this is the same scam that left a voice message on my phone.
They actually never used the term ‘social security’, but instead used the word ‘social’, as in there has been suspicious activity on your social.
There is also a creepy robo-caller out there leaving a message on our message machine about “tax rebates”.
Hopefully a Congressman or Senator will get scammed by one of these robocallers—then Congress will stop listening to phone company excuses, pretend the phone companies are Donald Trump and focus their attention on the issue.
In a just world, robocall scammers should be put to death.
I haven’t got this one yet, but I did get a voicemail telling me my Windows license had expired. My wife and I had a good laugh listening to that one...
Preying on the sick and elderly.
I assume SS never calls people but instead sends a letter like the IRS.
These scammers have honed in on me during the past week. It started with one call where some foreign guy tried to convince me he was with the Medicare “Pain Department”. I told him to never call my number again. They then began calling my number once or twice each day, each time from a similar, but different, number. You could tell they were using call spoofing. I reported it, and I just let the calls go to voicemail. It looks like they are starting to give up now.
The penalty for sending fake numbers to a caller id must be public hanging.
After a few of these calls, I decided to answer and I pushed “1”. The first thing I said was “what’s up, you called me?”
That got an instant hang up.
“After a few of these calls, I decided to answer and I pushed “1”. The first thing I said was “what’s up, you called me?””
I did something similar yesterday. They asked for “Pam” or some other name that I didn’t recognize, and I pressed “1” just to see what would happen. I guy with a Native Asian accent came on and asked me to verify that I was “Pam”, so I hung up at that point. No further contact, yet.
Himself just got this call the other night.
He laughed in their face and hung up.
/I have trained him well
Pretty easy to avoid all this. Just don’t answer the phone. If someone really wants to talk to you they will leave a message.
Never, ever say the word “yes” to one of these scammers.
I got the Social Security one, but the scammer must have forgotten to fill in some of the message. It said “your Social Security has been cancelled for ....” “reasons” (in a different voice) and then gave the number to call. I think they were supposed to put in what the reasons were.
It was so lame, we replayed it a couple of times, just for the laughs!
My M-i-L got the same type call, as did my step-dad. We all live in a community that has a high number of retirees, so it’s definitely a target area.
I get those types of calls regularly.
I just ignore numbers not on my contact list.
On the rare occasion it’s legitimate, they leave a voice mail message and I call them back. Mostly appointment reminders or a notice that something I ordered at a store has come in.
ANYBODY get this one ???
Jerome H. Powell (jeromhpoo002@bora.net)
Customers Service Hours / Monday To Saturday
Office Hours Monday To Saturday:
The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board
Building houses the main offices of the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
It is located at 20th Street and Constitution
Avenue, N.W., in Washington
Re: Important Notification
Re: Urgent Notice
The recent launched Joint External Debt Hub (JEDH) by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics (TFFS) This joint launch is by the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS), International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank and represents efforts to
Agree, and SS should be punished for not sharing with ICE when an illegal uses your SS number to “verify” their identity.
I get the robocall on the Medicare pain scam about once a week. I leave the ringer off on my phone and do not pick it up unless the caller ID is someone I know. And of course I have to be sitting next to the phone at that moment which I am not most of the time. But it’s interesting that some of these robocalls stay on so long that you end up with voicemails from them.
As long as the government does no more than assess fines against the robocallers that it catches, there is no incentive to stop. Simply a cost of doing business. There must be criminal penalties such as time in the pokey. Meeting new boyfriends who PIA will stick in the memory much more.
They haven’t yet found my cell phone, but my land line must ring 20 times a day. I rarely use it, and have connected it to a fax machine just for grins. Let the telemarketers get an earful of that squealing.
The Social Security System its self is a scam.
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