Fraudsters involved in a sophisticated phone scam have claimed more than $1 million from victims nationwide, but Lori Toste of Gilroy wasn’t one of them.
On Thursday night, she played a message she received on her home phone from a man with a “jumbled voice,” Toste said Monday. She could clearly make out one part of the message.
“I heard IRS and at the end he said ‘do not ignore this call and call as soon as possible to avoid legal action,’” Toste said. She was going to disregard the message until her daughter said she received the same one on her cell phone.
Toste dialed the 202 area code number on Friday morning, eager to resolve the matter. The man who answered told her he was with the Internal Revenue Service and that she had three pending criminal charges for tax evasion because she didn’t report all of her earnings between 2007 and 2013. According to the man, she owed more than $3,600—including penalties for non-payment.
“The guy was very nice to start out and he was very convincing,” Toste said. “He had me going for the first 10 minutes. I completely believed him and my heart was racing.”
The man asked Toste if she accepted the charges against her and she said “not at all,” adding that she would call her tax preparer and find out what the issue was.
“You can do that if you want, but you’re the one who gave him the information. It sounds like you just got caught committing fraud and you’re just trying to deny it,” Toste remembers the man saying in response.
That’s when Toste said she thought this was a scam, recalling that the man never asked for her name and didn’t ask for any other personal information. She asked the man to get the charging documents mailed to her and, as if a switch was flipped, his demeanor changed.
“You’re not going to get anything in writing. You’ll hear from the police in 24 hours,” Toste remembers the man saying.
Then she hung up.
For the next 15 minutes, Toste said she was shaking and her heart was still racing.
“I thought that if this was all true, he would call back,” she said. “I’ve had no calls since then.”
Toste avoided falling victim to what federal authorities are calling the largest scam they’ve ever seen.
If she would have continued the conversation, the fraudster would have asked for payment using re-loadable debit cards available at most convenience and grocery stores. In Toste’s case, the scammer threatened her with the revocation of her driver’s license, arrest, seizure of personal property and an immediate freeze on her financial assets if she didn’t pay.
“This isn’t IRS policy,” Treasury Inspector General for the Tax Administration J. Russell George said in a press release, adding agents will never ask for credit card information over the phone or ask for payment using a prepaid card.
After doing a web search on the phone number she dialed, following the advice of her friends, Toste began reading stories verifying the call was a scam. That’s when she calmed down and started laughing.
“He never got to the point where he had the option to ask me for money, so I don’t know how it would have went if he did,” Toste said. “I wouldn’t have paid him over the phone but it felt good he didn’t get me afterwards.”
Now, Toste freely tells her story in hopes she can make community members aware of how convincing the scammers—and their accusations of criminal activity—can be.
“If this happened to my mom and she heard IRS, she would have freaked out, gotten out her checkbook and paid,” she said. “It was so scary that I thought it was true.”
Those contacted by someone claiming to represent the IRS asking for immediate payment, who believe they do owe taxes, should hang up and call the IRS at 800-829-1040. Those who don’t owe taxes can call and report the incident to the Inspector General’s Office at 800-366-4484.
