From the New York Times:
Move over, Internal Revenue Service. Criminals now prefer the Social Security Administration as their cover agency when they try to swindle Americans over the phone.
The I.R.S. has long been a popular choice for telephone scammers, who call pretending to be federal tax representatives to extract money, personal information or both from consumers.
But federal authorities say they have seen fraudulent calls from Social Security Administration impostors “skyrocket” over the past year, overtaking the fake I.R.S. calls.
People filed over 76,000 reports about Social Security impostors in the 12 months ending in March, with reported losses of $19 million, according to the F.T.C., which investigates consumer fraud. About 36,000 of the complaints and $6.7 million of the losses were reported in February and March.
By comparison, the agency said, consumers reported $17 million in losses to the I.R.S. scam at its peak, during the 12 months that ended in September 2016. The data comes from the F.T.C.’s Consumer Sentinel Network database, a pool of millions of consumer complaints. ...
I would not be surprised if some legitimate calls were being reported as scams. One employee just called a client and demanded their bank account number without identifying themselves. The client called a week later mentioning they had not gotten their back pay or award letter. They told us about this "scam" as well and was worried someone else may have stolen her benefits. We called the local phone help desk to clarify because the local office was not answering the phone. Turns out the people in the payment center wanted to update her bank information. We were told the claimant was hostile and uncooperative when they first called her. Cannot fault her given the attitude we got when calling.
ReplyDeleteClearly, soft skills are not the forte of some SSA employees.
I have had trouble with some folks thinking I was scamming them. I just tell them to come into the SSA office to do whatever that needs to be done in order to complete the transaction.
ReplyDeleteAnd there has been a mandate from leadership that we all use the same script on our voice mail. In this scripted message we can only ask for a person's name and phone number when they leave a message. So, when we call them back we HAVE to ask for their SSN in order to look up their record. Yet, the Agency's public affairs people are constantly telling people to protect themselves from scammers by not giving out their personal information...
ReplyDelete@7:16
ReplyDeleteWell that's absurd.
@ 7:16 And annoying because you have no idea who you are calling or what you are calling about. It's much easier to respond to a question if you can look up their info ahead of time, especially if you only get their voicemail.
ReplyDeleteBoomers make for larger numbers of people to scam and after all they fell for Trickle Down Economics.
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