Thursday, January 14, 2016

Scam diction

We received our first “Internal Revenue Service” phone call this morning. Is that because we’re reading The Pale King ?

I listened to the recording a bit before hanging up:

“The reason of this call is to inform you that IRS is bringing a lawsuit against you,” &c.
The IRS doesn’t make such calls. But if you didn’t already know that, would you catch the details that mark this call as phony?

Related posts
Ballad of the spam mail : Fake speeding ticket : Phishing : Tech scamming

comments: 5

Chris said...

"Reason of this call" for starters. Don't scammers know that good grammar is an effective business tool?

We get these calls fairly often.

Daughter Number Three said...

"inform you that IRS..."

As if they would refer to themselves as the IRS vs. the Internal Revenue Service, and even if they did, that they would leave out the "the."

Michael Leddy said...

Those are the two things I noticed. Now I wish I'd listened longer. :)

Slywy said...

Friend got a call purportedly from a Microsoft vendor. Many red flags, but the best was when he asked what they thought his name was, and they said, "Joan."

Michael Leddy said...

We’ve had one of those calls with not a single Microsoft machine in the house. I enjoyed pointing that out to the caller.