I just got off the phone with another annoying call. The “IRS” called to say that they were filing a lawsuit against my husband for lack of proper payment. I think. To be honest it was very hard to understand what he was saying due to his thick accent. He also mispronounced the words Internal Revenue Service. I know this because he stopped mid-word and restarted. It was quite obvious from his monotonous, robotic tone, that he was reading from a script he’d read a million times and, with the volume of office noises in the background, it was surprising he heard me at all.
Was I scared and confused? No, not at all. I rolled my eyes and asked him to repeat as much info as possible, while I wrote it all down. Why was I not more scared? Well, I had already been through this when they called for me a few weeks ago. At that time, I was panicked when hearing the words IRS and lawsuit; but did some research and quickly found that it was nothing but a way for these horrible criminals to fool people into giving them money. Luckily, while on that first phone call, I realized that they were attempting to collect only on me. Since I file jointly with my husband, I immediately got an inkling that something fishy was going on. With this niggling feeling of something being not-quite-right, I told them that I had to check into how I could pay the amount they wanted (they conveniently take credit over the phone!) and got a reference number and contact info.
The next thing I did was go to the IRS website. Funny enough, they were already aware. They have a tab, right in the middle of the page, where you get links to tax scams and consumer alerts.
www.irs.gov
When you are ready to file a complaint, you will want to have as much of the following as possible:
Name, phone number you were contacted from, date of incident, method of contact (phone or email), numbers you may have been directed to call, any financial loss you may have occurred, method of payment, if you revealed any sensitive information, and any other information you can gather. All of which will be helpful to report these scammers to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/contact_report_scam.shtml
To submit a complaint via the online form, you will be asked for the following:
Please enter your name, address, city, state of residence, ZIP code, e-mail address, and/or your telephone number below. This will assist us if we need to get in touch with you for additional information.
You will also be asked to create a 5-digit pin code before being able to submit a claim, and their reasoning is sound:
In the event a TIGTA Special Agent contacts you about your complaint, please request the personalized PIN for confirmation. Please take caution if the person does not know the PIN.
Another wonderful feature of this simple reporting page, is this informational link regarding these scams:
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/press/press_tigta-2015-01_home.htm
Unless you missed it, there has been a YouTube video posted by a fed-up woman who got a couple of calls from these jerks. She cleverly turned the tables on them by playing along and then running a bit of a scam on them. Why not watch it…just for fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwJcOsaNhvg
*edited for tagging and categorizing maintenance