Scammers 2018

Yesterday I got a phone call from a woman who identified herself as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She claimed that I was under criminal investigation by the IRS and that I must contact them immediately. Actually, even at my advanced age, I quickly realized that it was not a woman or the IRS but a robocall scammer trying to defraud another senior citizen who stubbornly refuses to give up his landline.

You might ask why I answered the call in the first place given the unfamiliar number on my caller ID? Well, I do that for most of these incessant calls but sometimes it’s just easier to pick up the phone rather than fiddling around for reading glasses to see the number.  

A few days earlier I received an even more fraudulent message. The caller said it was my grandson. I do have grandsons of college age but due to the fact that they almost never call me, I expressed puzzlement about which one it might be. He then even asked “Don’t you recognize my voice?” It sounded a little like the one who was on a campus visit to Notre Dame so I went along.

He went on to say that he and some friends had gone out for a couple of drinks, gotten involved in an auto accident, been arrested for DUI, and jailed in Florida. It was obviously not a robocall but Florida is a long way from Indiana. I cursed him out and hung up the phone.

Who was the young man who makes a living by making calls like these? Who are the criminals who organize and run this fraudulent operation designed to prey upon grandparents?  Who was the woman who actually recorded the message from the IRS? Does she realize that when she records the message that she is acting in a criminal enterprise? What about the people who write the script and handle the technology? How can these people live with themselves or sleep at night?

I know that these operations are big business. The calls are incessant indicating that they must have some success. Seniors are being duped all over the country. I’ve read stories about granny withdrawing thousands from her savings account to rescue her imprisoned grandson.  You just need to search for IRS scammers to get an idea of the extent of that scam.

When I worked in sales, a popular form of advertising was “direct mail.” Statistics showed that the response rate was about 2%. If you sent our 1000 mailing pieces, you would usually get about 20 replies depending on the quality of the list you purchased. If you got back 20 “leads,” it would usually result in enough sales to pay the cost of the mailing and still produce a profit.  

Advertising is much more sophisticated and scientific these days but it still works on the same principle. Look at all the catalogs and flyers you get in the mail each day. Of course, advertising giants like Google and Facebook have become household words by applying mass mailing techniques online. Lately, the Federal government has been turning its attention to the so-called privacy practices of legitimate businesses like Google and Facebook.

Still, I don’t see why government could not stop the obviously fraudulent scammers and robocallers who invade our privacy throughout each and every day. I know one could say that people should be able to take care of themselves and avoid these obvious scams, but government does require warning labels on cigarette packs, and makes it a crime to drive without fastening one’s seatbelt.

With modern technology it should be easy enough to track toll-free-numbers that make millions of automatic calls, and require background checks to weed out the criminals. It is time we got these criminals off our phone lines. Free speech is one thing but our Constitution does not allow freedom of speech to machines or robots.

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