
US breaks up IRS phone scam operation - voodooranger
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/business/irs-phone-scams-jeff-sessions.html
======
jonathanmayer
I worked on countering phone scams and robocalls at the Federal Communications
Commission for over a year. This operation was a big win and an impressive
international collaboration.

That said, the robocall problem is getting worse, not better. Robocall volume
is at an all-time high:
[https://robocallindex.com/](https://robocallindex.com/)

In many respects, the problem of telephone spam today is similar to the
problem of email spam in the early 2000s. Litigating against spammers had
limited efficacy, so the community developed blacklists, better filtering, and
stronger authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC).

Until the major carriers get serious about similar steps, especially filtering
and authentication (i.e. SHAKEN and STIR), these fraudulent calls won't stop.
And, in the interim, vulnerable populations will continue to be
disproportionately victimized.

~~~
anonymous5133
I think the problem has gotten so serious that the traditional voice-based
phone system is pretty much unusable. I don't even bother to answer the phone.
Instead I have a voice mail message that tells people to send a text message
instead. I can't be the only one who does something like this or has some
other system in place to not have to deal with robocalls/scam callers.

~~~
r00fus
Not sure what carrier you're using but T-Mobile in the US just released "scam
block" ( I had "scam ID" turned on previously).

In addition to marking calls as scam, now they simply block them outright.
Getting approximately 0 scam calls in the past 2 days.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I believe Google recently released something similar for Android.

These calls are spam for phones. Certainly, there's an obvious pattern that
can be identified and then neutralized.

~~~
supertrope
Email spam became tractable on the end user side with domain and IP address
risk scoring. Caller IDs are so easily spoofable it's like open relay email
servers of the past.

~~~
chiefalchemist
When they spoof are they using otherwise valid numbers? That is, if you
returned the call you'd speak to someone's grandmother?

None the less, can't the phone providers detect the excessive outgoing
traffic? And if it's a residential number can't that raise a red flag?

------
shawn
_Two other conspirators in Illinois were sentenced in February to between two
years to just over four years for conspiracy, and a third person in Arizona
was given probation in a plea agreement, it said._

Sounds like the Prisoner’s Dilemma paid off for that third person.

------
randomdrake
Kitboga, over on Twitch[1], frequently livestreams the experience of talking
to people executing IRS scams. Among other types of computer scams like
"unlock your computer for X dollars," it's fascinating to listen in on the
tactics used to prey on unassuming victims.

[1] - [https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga](https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga)

~~~
fallat
Such a legend. I hope he gets some sort of "Good guy of the year" award. It
inspires me to make sure my own abilities contribute to the greater good.

~~~
klaustopher
I think having around 10.000 viewers at a time and the donations and subs
coming in is helping ;)

------
nerflad
I am so happy to see some of these predators get caught. A former coworker, a
very smart but also very naive network engineer from the middle east, was
hooked by these people shortly after immigrating. They said they were the US
government and that he would be immediately deported if he didn't cooperate.
He ending up sending them $30,000 if I recall correctly. :(

~~~
Scoundreller
The reality is that the world is complicated. Some calls asking for money are
completely legitimate, and if you don't act, bad things will happen. Others
are total scams.

If you're new here, they both sound the same because they are: People asking
money for stupid reasons. E.g. mis-applied payments, a "1st-world" banking
system where payments take several days, lack of chip-and-PIN resulting in
overdrafts and failed bill payments.

In some places, if a reporter stops by your work to ask you questions, you'll
lose your job if you don't answer them, because the newspaper is the
government. In the USA, it's usually the opposite.

It takes a while to sort it all out.

~~~
viraptor
> Some calls asking for money are completely legitimate, and if you don't act,
> bad things will happen.

Have you got some examples? I don't think I ever got a call asking me for
money. Or at least not one that I needed to act on immediately - a call from
letting agency to check my rent payment would be the closest, but it was both
verified and done outside of the call.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I don 't think I ever got a call asking me for money_

I have gotten fraud alert calls from my bank or card issuer. When I got those,
I would thank them, hang up and dial the number on the back of my card.
Usually legit, but once it was not.

~~~
viraptor
The fraud alerts don't really ask you for money though. They give you
information to act on rather than ask you for anything.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Fraud alert as in “did you do that? Because we froze your account in the
meantime.” To lift the freeze, you have to tell them things.

~~~
viraptor
That's interesting. I never got more than "did you make this transaction?"
question, but I could imagine a scammer could start asking more detailed
questions.

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_bxg1
Don't know if this is the same group, but it's pretty cathartic to watch

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4)

~~~
Scoundreller
What all these bots need are phrases/scripts that the public can feed to them.

The phrases that keep them on the line the longest get played in the pool more
frequently.

Long recordings get automatically posted to youtube.

They're so internet 1.0, we need to get to 2.0!

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JumpCrisscross
> _2 contractors in India involving five call centers in Ahmedabad, a city in
> western India, have been indicted on wire fraud, money laundering and other
> conspiracy charges as part of the operation, the department said. They have
> yet to be arraigned, it said._

Is there any realistic chance of Indian law enforcement catching up with these
guys?

~~~
iamshs
None. Especially from that state, Gujarat. Home of corporate and financial
crime. Sagar Thakkar fled to East Europe last year after netting $300 MM. It
is upto FBI too pull its weight.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
What? If you google his name it says the Indian government caught him in Dubai
last year and he’s been sitting in jail ever since

~~~
wila
Caught him in Mumbai on his return from Dubai :)

Had to google that as I wondered how they managed to catch him in another
country.

------
foepys
I wonder why this isn't a problem in Europe, at least I haven't heard of
anything like it. Is it because Indians don't speak
German/French/Spanish/etc.? Or is the American phone system somehow worse than
the European?

~~~
toasterlovin
Probably because it’s easier to find Indian/Filipino call center operators who
speak English and the US is such a large market that there’s no need to expand
into smaller European markets.

------
workshop_leads
Something not talked about. Big uptick in robo calls since sites started
texting me security codes to sign in.

~~~
supertrope
Might be a coincidence. I'm sure some companies blatantly sell your contact
information. It only takes one.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sell, or just (pretend to) don't notice it being taken away.

The story I've heard several times from different people about how it's
handled in Poland - your operator usually subcontracts their support &
telemarketing to a third party; some spammer will pay an employee of that
third party to "liberate" their customer database as they end their
employment.

------
duxup
Nice to see some great cooperation with all those groups.

>“hundreds of millions” of dollars

I guess I'm not scamming anyone out of anything but if I was and got a
million.... I like to think I'd be smart enough to burn everything and
enjoy...

~~~
torbjorn
Greed is a complex and consuming emotion, don't underestimate it's ability to
ensare people.

~~~
toomanybeersies
It's not just greed, or criminals.

I hear people all the time saying "if I made a startup and sold if for
millions of dollars, I'd retire and never work again", when most people who do
make millions on their startup continue to work. It's that work ethic that is
what made them that multi-million dollar startup.

Whether criminal or not, there's a particular work ethic that keeps people
like this making more money when they could retire happily.

~~~
duxup
I feel like that is a bit different.

The dude who sold their startup doesn't have much to lose at that point to
take another shot.

The criminal though who goes for that extra million can lose it all.

Very different risks and stuff to weigh.

------
WalterBright
I've been pestered several times a day with the "last chance to lower your
credit card rates" phone scam. I finally hit on a solution. I press 1 to speak
to a representative, I get a human, then I follow their script until it gets
to the "what's your credit card number" question.

I say I have to go look for it. So I randomly make noises like opening doors,
closing drawers, shuffling papers. I had one on the line for 10 minutes before
he gave up.

After a couple doses of "the treatment", they stop calling. Blessed relief!

This method works because it costs them human time. Just hanging up on their
robot, or their human, doesn't work. They just call again.

------
cmurf
I had an old landline number ported to Google Voice about 10 years ago. Now,
90% of the calls on that number are spam. Anything marked as spam in Google
Voice still passes through to the Hangouts app. Google has done the most
supremely crap job with Hangouts and Google Voice integration. Hey let's
passthrough spam to the app _and_ have no search function!

Hilariously quite a lot of calls are "Google SEO" related, scammy sounding
credit offers, and political donation solicitations.

------
walrus01
A lot of the Indian scammers have moved on to pretending to be the CRA (Canada
revenue agency), the Canuck version of the IRS. Toronto and Vancouver area
codes are plagued by robodialers connecting to fake cra scam call centers.
Canada has a lot less resources than the US to spend manpower investigating
and building cases with the Indian law enforcement agencies.

------
mintplant
A friend lost a significant amount of money to what could have been this scam.
The MO fits (posing as the IRS, threatening with arrest/deportation,
collecting payments via gift cards).

The article mentions restitution. Does anyone know how he could find out if
he's eligible?

~~~
jasongill
This response is going to sound like a joke but it isn't: be sure to tell him
that they won't call him to discuss restitution. It's extremely common for
scammers to sell the list of their successful "buyers". Marks on the IRS scam
lists will now be called by people saying "we are from the IRS scam
restitution department, just need your bank details so we can return your
money..."

~~~
supertrope
This is so sad. It's kind of like how charities heavily target those who have
given before. And spear-phishing.

------
cwkoss
Business idea: shared phone assistants. Whenever someone calls your number,
the assistant answers only "hello?", they have to speak to your assistant and
ask for you by name and/or passphrase to be connected to you.

You can add some prestige to calling someone (having a human answering and
screening your calls for you) at a pretty low cost (1 minute per call? 2-3
cheap workers could cover the whole biz, could share lines between ~ 50-100
people with distinct sounding names). eliminate all unsolicited calls for the
customer.

~~~
supertrope
Too expensive to scale. Recorded greetings and directories have been around
for a long time. Just having "Welcome to XYZ Co. For sales press 1, for
support press 2, for a staff directory press 3" etc. is fairly effective in
rebuffing robocalls as only human spammers bother pressing digits.

------
torbjorn
Good work, now go after those "extended warranty" people.

------
tonyquart
I have just read some recent reports and complaints filed by people at
[http://www.whycall.me/631-318-6350.html](http://www.whycall.me/631-318-6350.html)
about these IRS scams. I think people should have been really aware of such
scams, because they have been around harassing us for years. We also need to
keep spreading the words to everyone about this.

------
exabrial
Dang, I liked wasting these guys time. My technique was to pause as long as
possible while obviously stuffing my face with Cheetos and telling them hang
on

~~~
supertrope
I conferenced in a bot called Lenny:

sip:13475147296@in.callcentric.com or plain old 1-347-514-7296

A lot of spam callers hang up once I say I'm transferring them, but sometimes
they talk to Lenny until the whole script loops!

------
jacobr
> They chose their victims through information obtained from “data brokers” or
> from other sources, the department said.

Would be interesting to know more about this. In the legit call center
business the phone numbers of people who have previously bought something are
more valuable. The ability to target specific demographics is probably a
prerequisite for a scam like this, calling randomly would be really expensive.

~~~
supertrope
It could be either way. Obviously targeted to specific demographics is the
most effective, but phone calls especially robocalls are very cheap. Even
ratios as low as 10^-6 are profitable when you make millions of robocalls. The
USA Do Not Call list is a de facto live number list. Illegal telemarketers
(redundant?) can directly use it as their target list. Another method is to
randomly call numbers and mark "Hello?" responses as live.

------
unsignedint
I rarely receive calls these days and when I receive, they are mostly scams or
telemarketers, so I basically accept call from a small set of whitelist and
drop the rest.

Most people who need to speak to me attempt to contact me via different means
anyways. I don't have much faith they will ever fix PSTN that I'm dreaming for
the day I can start ignoring all calls.

------
joejerryronnie
You know, this scam probably wouldn't have been as successful if the real IRS
didn't behave like a bunch of shady scam artists themselves. Twice over the
years, I've been sent very intimidating letters by the IRS claiming I owe back
taxes on clearly erronous assumptions by them. These have both been cleared up
by submitting documentation but I've had to spend a good chunk of time in
doing so. I also cannot phone them directly, I must fax reams of personal info
to some random fax number with no confirmation they even received it.

By the time I received the IRS letters, I typically had to respond within a
matter of days or face additional penalties (what if I was on vacation). Even
the most basic of cross checking my tax forms would have clearly shown
everything was legit. And these were by no means unusual or complex tax
situations, just very basic things that millions of Americans report on their
taxes every year. But even though I knew everything was above board, the tax
laws are so convoluted that I was in constant fear the IRS would still find
some BS reason I owed them more money.

------
microcolonel
Good work, it's heartening to see that these institutions eventually work
together. Hopefully this success can be replicated with scammers who have
targets less directly interesting to the state.

------
advertising
Literally got an fake IRS robocall threatening litigation yesterday and my
brother received the same call the day before that.

------
wizardofmysore
Do they ask for direct bank transfer? US government should educate citizens
about the only accepted ways of payment to US gov.

~~~
gangstead
From what I've read the victim is asked to go buy itunes gift cards and read
the numbers to the scammers. They are looking for only the most vulnerable of
people.

------
mr_overalls
Can anyone recommend an app to block these robocalls?

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WalterBright
Yeah, well, I got one of those calls just last Friday.

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crb002
Finally. I've been harassed by those idiots for almost a year. How did it take
so long?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _How did it take so long?_

Collective action problem [1]. Namely, our system requires people to document
and report such problems. Few people do. As a result, certain problems get
disproportionate interest compared to others.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action)

------
paradroid
A fake IRS phone scam? So it's a real IRS phone scam, and not a fake one?

------
partycoder
\- Call your phone provider, ask them to block all incoming international
calls.

\- Ask international callers to use an app instead.

I used to get calls every day and after doing this it stopped.

~~~
rdtsc
Most calls from scammers I get come from my area code. Well it makes it easy
for me, since I don't live in the area code my cell phone is from, so I know
not to pickup. But in general blocking international calls might be easily
circumvented.

~~~
partycoder
They don't come from your area code, that's just part of the spoofing.

~~~
rdtsc
I meant to say the caller ID shows numbers from the local area code often. So
blocking international numbers might not work.

~~~
aparks517
The signaling data includes the real origin. CID is convenience data provided
by the originator. The telcos wouldn’t use it for anything important, like
billing.

~~~
rdtsc
> The signaling data includes the real origin

Anyone can set up a bunch Asterisk or Freeswitch servers anywhere in the world
and use VOIP. How does it know where the "real" origin is.

~~~
aparks517
The origin within the SS7 network. Someone has to pay the bill ;)

