Just listen to the voicemail I received from a spoofed DC phone number today:
Chilling, ain’t it?
There are so many red flags in this message. Anyone who’s ever tried to contact the IRS knows it’s positively Kafkaesque trying to get someone on the phone. And even if you could get someone from the IRS on the phone, the agency has always said that it communicates by mail.
But what really gives this away as a scam call is “Officer Shirley Cruz’s” south Asian accent and odd turns of phrasing. And you can feel the ennui of someone who’s cold-called a bazillion numbers and has repeated these bizarre threats too many times for them to be delivered with any conviction.
You, me and other readers of this blog are the last people who would be caught up in this scam. But the FCC and the IRS need to do more to stop this. The FCC should mandate anti-spoofing technology for the phone network. And the IRS needs to do more to catch and penalize the people behind these audacious frauds.
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