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back to article With millions upon millions out of work in the US, here come the scammers claiming victims' unemployment money using stolen info

With US unemployment threatening to reach its highest level since the Great Depression, hackers around the globe are using stolen personal information to file fraudulent benefits claims and steal millions of dollars destined for jobless Americans. The Secret Service confirmed to The Register it has received reports of criminal …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Got an "IRS" call today...

    I knew it was fake the moment the recording started claiming it was the IRS. The IRS site (IRS.Gov) is emphatic that the IRS will *never* call you, so anyone that does & claims to be them is a lying sack of shit. Ignore them.

    I decided to try & get sufficient info out of them to perhaps be able to file a useful police report. I strung the "agent" on for as long as I could, asking about this & that, wanting to know stuff about the stimulus payments that I was able to verify in real time (site open in front of me, audio from it to an earpiece, telephone with the scammer on the other ear), and kept finding stuff with which to trip them up.

    They finally got to the part where they wanted my payment info, I asked "If you're the IRS then you should already have that, right?"

    "Oh, we do, but we have to verify it with you to make sure you're you."

    Shouldn't you have verified my ID at the very beginning to make sure you weren't wasting everyone's time by talking to the wrong person?

    "Oh, we know it's you, we just have to make sure it's you."

    Uh huh, and pigs can painlessly fly out my ass. "So, does your mom know you scam honest folks out of their hard earned money, or is she currently spinning in her grave in shame & disgust over what you've become?"

    The guy called me some naughty things in an East Indian language then slammed down the phone.

    Hmmmm... I wonder if the IRS makes calls from India?

    Posting anon because I don't want them to realize whose been fekkin wit' their heads. =-D

    *Waving* Hi guys! Fek off an' die!

    11 1 Reply
    1. sanmigueelbeer
      Reply Icon

      Re: Got an "IRS" call today...

      The guy called me some naughty things in an East Indian language then slammed down the phone

      Oh that's nothing. I once inserted the word "Pakistani" in the sentence to an Indian scammer (describing his nationality).

      Let's just say, he didn't hold back.

      NOTE: I regretted not recording that call.

      16 0 Reply
      1. Steve Kerr
        Reply Icon

        Re: Got an "IRS" call today...

        Thanks for the trigger word - didn't think of that one before.

        Much appreciated - it will become well used, now I just need a means of recording my land line.

        8 0 Reply
        1. sanmigueelbeer
          Reply Icon
          Happy

          Re: Got an "IRS" call today...

          Much later, I got ready and managed to record a very rude scammer. One of the recordings can be found here (YouTube).

          Enjoy.

          0 0 Reply
        2. Shadow Systems
          Reply Icon

          At Steve, re: recording your calls...

          A friend once sent me a small device he'd bought off of Amazon.

          It plugs into your landline corded handset between the base & the handset itself. Everything the phone transmits is also sent down a patch cable to a standard 3.5mm audio in plug for capturing by any device that accepts a mic. Everything they say, everything you say, their call quality might be crap & the recording will reflect that, but your stuff should be crystal clear.

          You just have to remember to keep a recording device plugged in & either charged up or itself plugged in to an outlet, but you can then record your conversations just as quickly as you can punch "record".

          IANAL, I don't know the laws regarding making such recordings in your neck of the woods, so contact one & find out before you wind up getting your butt in trouble.

          Otherwise, visit Amazon & look for a telephone recording patch cable. Enjoy a pint & be sure to provide us the Youtube link to your uploaded recordings! =-D

          1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Secret Service does not comment on active cases

    If they did comment, would they be considered the Not-So-Secret Service?

    (Sorry)

    6 0 Reply
  3. MrMerrymaker

    Scammers are an infamia

    That goes double for whoever sets up robocalls - at least with humans I can waste their time.

    All scammers must be set alight.

    4 0 Reply
    1. doublelayer Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Scammers are an infamia

      While I tend not to actively interact with their call by pressing a number to talk with one of their agents, I frequently leave the call connected and wait for their automatic system to hang up. Depending on how complex their setup is, it may have a limit to number of concurrent calls (or better yet, they may pay by the minute). Since incoming calls are free on my plan, I am happy to let them keep talking. Back when they had an Eliza program handling the first stages and would call me once a week to test it out, I used to have it play against a simple program I wrote to read out random sentences whenever the bot stopped talking. Sadly, they seem to have stopped and now the only calls I get ask me to press one and hang up after two or three repeats of their recording.

      0 0 Reply
      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Scammers are an infamia

        "Since incoming calls are free on my plan,"

        What? You mean where you are there a phone plans where the recipient has to pay to receive calls? I've never heard of that over here, thank $deity. I'd be very pissed off if I was paying to take calls from scammers.

        1 1 Reply
        1. skeptical i
          Reply Icon

          Re: Scammers are an infamia

          re: pay to receive incoming calls

          Back in the early- to mid-1990s, at least in my corner of the universe (Murka), when cellphones were still juuuuust becoming more affordable for the great unwashed, most plans required the caller to pay for each call but there were variants that required the recipient to pay. This, I hear, was used by sales people (real estate, for example) who wanted no obstacles between them and potential customers (I suppose 800-/toll free numbers would be the land-line equivalent). Not an option I'd ever choose (spam calls are bad enough but paying for the "privilege"? no thanks) but some people did. That said, I'm surprised that carriers still offer this plan at all, unless the only options are caller pays per-call or recipient pays per-call, and there is no unlimited (or "unlimited") usage plan.

          0 0 Reply
        2. doublelayer Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Scammers are an infamia

          I have had plans where, while you didn't pay for calls directly, you had a time limit after which you would have to start paying. Incoming calls would not count against that limit until you had been on them for at least a minute, but then the clock would start to count down. I think you can still get such a plan here, but I haven't had one like that in a decade. I think it's mostly still available for those who prefer lower bills, because mine is higher than it has a right to be.

          0 0 Reply
  4. macjules
    Unhappy

    Here come the carpetbaggers ..

    Led by the Carpetbagger-in-chief flogging hydroxychloroquine :(

    6 0 Reply
    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Here come the carpetbaggers ..

      I wonder if he or friends has shares in a manufacturer? It was made clear some weeks ago the stuff isn't of any measurable use and is moire that outweighed by risks, not mention that panic buying will possibly kill people who need it for its stated uses.

      2 1 Reply
  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Why does this continue to happen in the US ?

    Stolen identity is no laughing matter in any country, but frankly the USA seems to take the cake in the amount of ways someone can pass himself off as someone else and benefit from it.

    In France, you cannot get a bank to send money from an account, no matter how many details you have on the person. Basically, even if it is actually your account and you are you, you can't get your bank to do it over the phone. The bank wants to see you in person at the nearest agency. More so if you want a loan. So that's most banking issues solved.

    However, France also has a government portal. You can do most administrative stuff on it with your government-assigned ID and password. I shudder to think what would happen if someone got hold of my details, but on the other hand, there's no money there. The worst thing a hacker could do is change my annual income report. A hassle, to be sure, but nothing that couldn't be handled with a face-to-face meeting with a tax inspector.

    And given that we don't have public credit ratings (I'm sure banks have their rating of you, but they don't share), nobody can go and ruin mine.

    So how is it that the USA is basically a constant target for identity theft and that it is so lucrative for the scammers ?

    3 0 Reply
    1. Steve K
      Reply Icon

      Re: Why does this continue to happen in the US ?

      It's a numbers game. There are many more people in the US than in France, plus (i am guessing here), most Indian-based call centre scammers don't speak French either.

      0 1 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why does this continue to happen in the US ?

      When we moved back to the UK from France, our French bank (Credit Mutuel) refused to transfer any of our money to our UK bank account. We ended up taking a loan out in the UK to cover our living expenses while waiting several months for the French bank to finally allow us to access to our own money. The problem was a mix of French bureaucracy and their customary incompetence. In France the customer is always wrong and to be shat upon from a great height for as long as they (large companies) can get away with it.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: customary incompetence

        Customary incompetence ? Really ?

        Okay, let's compare and contrast. I am at Credit Mutuel. We bought our current house in October 2017. We had one meeting in person to iron out the loan details, everything else happened either over the phone or by the bank's portal. The amount of hassle was minimal, and everything went through swimmingly.

        My daughter used to be at the Caisse d'Epargne. She was a student studying in Paris when we bought our house. She needed a student loan. The Caisse d'Epargne was obviously a bunch of muppets because they refused the loan based on the fact that her access card did not mention the word "student". One call to our Credit Mutuel agent and she had her loan within the week.

        I don't know who you dealt with, but I strongly believe your issues were not solely with Credit Mutuel.

        1 1 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: customary incompetence

          Consider yourself lucky to have a decent branch/staff and not to have had a problem (yet). We were with Credit Mutuel for twelve years. Usually they were OK to deal with and I speak reasonable French. There was more than one occasion while queuing to see a cashier that a French customer has been laying into the them for cocking this or that up. When they do cock up they do it in style. The (decent) manager at our branch retired in our final year in France and was replaced with an officious demi-god who looked down her nose at customers and did her best to be as unhelpful and snarky as possible. I also got the vibe that she especially didn't like English people.

          0 0 Reply
  6. Jan 0 Silver badge

    There's something fundamentally flawed about calling a secret service The Secret Service, especially when it makes itself known to the world and makes Press Releases.. Nobody knows about my secret cellar laboratory for instance, oh, wait...

    2 1 Reply
    1. Andy Non Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Too late Dee Dee is heading into your secret lab... (explosion imminent)

      1 0 Reply
  7. Synkronicity

    The Etymology of Secret Service

    It's called the Secret Service because it was the only law enforcement agency at the time of its creation not to have a pre-defined role. The naming was intentionally vague to allow the agency the bureaucratic mandate to do whatever Congress needed it to do without having to create a dozen individually defined agencies. This is why they're in charge of things as diverse as dignitary protection and financial crimes. It was never actually meant to be a secret of any kind.

    In case you were curious like I was.

    1 0 Reply

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