Phone scams

I've had two four five phone scam attempts on me or my family recently. I don't know if it's just random clustering or if this is a problem on the rise. In case it's the latter, I thought I'd mention them here so folks can be on the alert.

"United States Department of Grants" Scam

This one came it today (8 December), and was an exact duplicate of the "blood thinner" scam with the details altered. They asked for my wife by name and claimed to be from the "United States Department of Grants". Caller ID showed a 202 area code, suggesting the call in fact originated from Washington, DC, but of course there is no such department with the US government, so this was a transparent scam.

Since he asked for my wife and I'm not one to act as a gatekeeper for her I told him to hold on and see if she was available. (I had intended to turn it over to her with a warning that it was a scam, so she should get rid of him as soon as possible.) Apparently, either his script didn't call for that, or he was insufficiently familiar with English-language personal names to recognize an obviously feminine one when he saw it, because when I came back to the phone he was talking into it wondering where I had gone. I got rid of him in short order and left a warning for her not to give any personal information. She's usually smart enough to recognize such things, but all bets are off if you talk to her right after waking her up.

The BBB has some information on this one.

"Blood thinner drug" scam

I got this one twice this morning (28 October). Two calls from people with Indian accents (the second obviously not named "Jack" as he claimed) who said they were calling from a "Medical Center" and that someone in my house was taking a "blood thinner" medication, the name of which escapes me now. They woke me up with these calls so I had no patience to listen to them for long, but this appears to be a brand new scam connected to a court settlement with a German drug manufacturer. The only other information on it I could find was a report given here: www.scamcallfighters.com/scam-…

Grandson Bail Scam

My mother-in-law "Joan" didn't fall for this one, not so much because she's particularly savvy but because she was a poor target. The scammers call random elderly women, hoping to get one who has grandsons but doesn't keep in close touch with them.

A week ago, Joan received a call from someone claiming to be a court official from the Dominican Republic, saying that her grandson had been arrested and needed $5,000 to get bailed out. The "grandson" was put on the line. Joan didn't quite recognize his voice, but the grandson he sounded most like was my own younger son, who is 15 and autistic and very much neither under arrest nor in the Dominican Republic. She has three other grandsons, though. One, my older son, is 18 but severely disabled and also living at home. A third grandson was already in prison. That left only one possibility, "Jack", who she had not in fact spoken to for awhile. Jack had a tendency to get in trouble with the law and had been known to travel on short notice, so it was not impossible that it was him. So she asked "Is this Jack?" and was naturally told yes.

Joan may not have spoken with Jack in years, but she was in close, frequent contact with his mother, "Patti", who lives in my house and helps us with child care. Joan was suspicious, but after putting the scammers off she gave Patti a call, where she naturally found out that Jack was safe at home, gainfully employed, and neither in the Dominican Republic nor under arrest.

The scammers actually had the cojones to call Joan back to pressure her for the money, telling her the judge was waiting and time was short, but by then Joan had already reported the attempted scam to the police.

CNN story
FBI warning

IRS Investigation Scam

This happened just this morning, and it was simple enough. My phone rang at 6 AM with a recorded message purporting to be from the IRS. It had supposedly been found that I had failed to report all my income from 2012 and that I had to pay back taxes that were due before "legal action would be taken against [my] name," along with a callback number to the 202 area code.

While the Washington, DC area code might have made this seem legit, the immediate red flag was that the IRS never issues tax irregularity notices by phone. They always initiate these matters by mail. A tax problem where your first IRS contact is by phone will always be a scam attempt.

Online research showed me that the progress of this scam might run as follows: If you call back, you will be put in touch with an "investigator". He'll give you his name and badge number, and then tell you that you owe $1,000 or more in back taxes and penalties, that your bank accounts and other assets have already been frozen, and that legal proceedings will begin to seize your property unless you wire the amount owed to them immediately. He may even "confirm" your identity by giving the last 4 digits of your Social Security number. He may also suggest you get an attorney.

This is all calculated to scare the bejeezus out of you to get you to send the money as fast as possible, before you have time to think about it. Needless to say, don't do it.

Parade story
IRS press release

Microsoft Tech Support Call Scam

This one happened just today. (I'm editing this entry on 24 September.) It was a cold call with no caller ID. A man with a heavy foreign accent claimed he was calling from Microsoft. He was kind enough to tell me he assumed I was the owner of the computer in the house, and that my computer was generating numerous errors which they had recorded on their own servers.

I hung up at that point, as I wouldn't have fallen for it even if this one hadn't been tried on me before. He was going to direct me to my machine's error logs. Were I not a professional software engineer, I might indeed find all the routine error messages that get logged pretty much every time I reboot my machine to be kind of scary. They were going to ask for access to my machine, at which point they were going to charge me some kind of "modest" fee to make the repairs they were going to try and convince me were necessary.

Needless to say, Microsoft does not, and practically speaking, cannot and has no reason to, log every minor event on every machine running a Microsoft operating system everywhere in the world. If you get a cold call from someone claiming to be tech support, who somehow has information on the internals of your operating system, don't believe them. Ever.

Malwarebytes page on tech support scams