The most prevelant scam on the telephone

Social Security impersonators

One of the most pernicious scams going on the telecom network right now is the Social Security scam.

How it works: a victim receives a robocall leaving a threatening voicemail, nearly always with a computerized voice. It prompts the telephone subscriber to either press a button or to call back the scammer. If they don't, their Social Security number will be suspended and a warrant will be placed for their arrest.

In this scam the phone agent tells the victim that they are a criminal investigator or officer with the Social Security Administration. The scheme involves telling the victim that their identity was stolen and—unironically—if they do not cooperate with the scammer that they will be arrested. The phone script the scammer reads invariably always leads to this: your identity was associated with a Toyota Corolla that was found near the Texas-Mexican border, with traces of blood and cocaine in the vehicle; and that the vehicle's regisration was traced back to you.

After this is explained, the scammer will then ask if you want to cooperate or not. Frightened victims will indicate that they will, and then the scam continues with a handoff to another phone agent working in the same call center who is presented to you as a superior.

The call continues until the scammer posing as the superior officer talks you into purchasing gift cards to facilitate transferring balances out of your account to a safe account. Most people never get this far in the scam call because it takes over 40 minutes until this point is reached. The victims who make it to the very end all have the same story: they were talked into heading to the nearest retail store to load large sums of cash on to gift cards then read the serial numbers over to the scammer. Scammers insist on iTunes and Google Play cards as it makes their withdrawl untraceable to law enforcement, unlike banking cards.

This is the most widespread type of scam today on the telecom network. Unlike with IRS scammers, there have been few raids of the criminals behind this type of fraud. Nearly 100% of the telecom traffic from these scammers originates in India; however not all of the masterminds behind this type of scam are purely Indian-based. Several of these Social Security scammers have USA-based money mules and some of the individuals behind these scams reside in the United States.

One of the oldest government impersonation scams

Internal Revenue Service

This is the type of telephone scam that everyone is familiar with and has been going on for more than a decade. The scammer informs a victim that there has been a "mistake" on their taxes and if they do not take immediate corrective action, they will be sued.

While our researchers still observe some scammers trying the IRS scam; these occrences get rarer with each day. The scam has become ineffective because of its widespread prevalence over the years to the point that most every telephone subscriber has become accostomed. It's only because the IRS scam has been meme-ified that it's no longer profitable to scammers.