For my non-Aussie friends, the ATO = Australian Taxation Office.
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Is this as big an issue in other countries?
Here in Australia when you buy a gift card through the self checkout, a warning pops up about scams that you have to click ok through. There’s also messages that come over the in-store radio warning about not paying with gift cards too.
A few years ago in a town near me here in Canada, an old lady was trying to buy a bunch of gift cards from the local Staples outlet. The staff talked to her and realized she was getting scammed and tried to talk her out of it, but she refused to listen and got angry when they wouldn’t sell her the cards. She left and went to a different store in town where the same thing happened. It took the local police to come down and talk to her before she realized she was close to losing a ton of money.
The scam is just someone calling and telling the person they need to buy gift cards (from other comments, presumably to pay a tax bill)?
Yes, and it works with enough people for it to be an ongoing scam for a decade at least.
If I had to guess it’s closer to two decades. They used to do it (may still) with reloadable Visa and MasterCard. Due to TV shows making getting audited by the IRS a huge deal and being told the government is coming for their money for decades, old people fall for this scam. Most of them have taken the standard deduction their whole life and have had someone else doing their taxes for years, but they’re terrified that the tax man is gonna throw them in the hoosegow. It’s the same reason a lot of children are frightened that they’ll catch on fire a lot as an adult or that quicksand was going to be a huge deal. Stop, drop, and roll was beaten into us. Quicksand was a problem in an episode of almost every cartoon and many live action comedy shows we watched.
That’s in the states. I have to assume it’s the same in at least some other countries with shit tax laws. If we’d update to a better tax system that scam would go away in just a few years.
Great explanation, plus that is the first time I have ever seen hoosegow spelled out!
Stop drop and roll is actually the one thing that people should learn, because in the general population a large number of people do catch have their clothes catch on fire and need to be able to put it out the right way.
Yes, they also do ones where they say they are from Microsoft and even make viruses that make scary red pop-ups with their call center numbers. Some of them even remote into boomer’s PCs with like AnyDesk or GoToPC and they like show them the Task Manager and find like a svchost instance and say “ SEE THIS IS BAD, WE MUST REMOVE THE VIRUS! You can pay now, use Google Gift Cards”
There are even some that make it look like they accidentally transferred money into the person’s account (they get marks to open their bank portal and they literally edit source in front of them sometimes) and then they say”oops! Oh no, I messed up! My boss is gonna be so mad! My family, they will go hungry! Oh please, you must help me get this money back! Do it with gift cards so they won’t catch on!”
Kitboga is a famous streamer who gets these guys on the line and does characters to waste their time, and it’s quite informative about the kind of stuff they do
If you’d like an explanation/in-depth look at how this scam works, I’d heavily recommend checking out this guy’s videos where he baits scammers live with voice changing hardware and wastes as much of their time as possible. They’re enlightening and very funny.
The annoying thing is they also get really insistent that it is a scam even when it’s not. My grandma (an old lady) always buys a mountain of giftcards every year for christmas just because it’s a big family and that makes for easy christmas gifts. Every year she has to argue with someone that, no she isn’t getting scammed and they are actually for christmas gifts. You would think stores would be a little more lax on that around the holidays but aparently not.
Often this is part of the scam. Once the scammers have you convinced that they’re official, they tell you to say it’s for holidays or a birthday or something like that so you don’t get stopped when buying gift cards.
Of course, this makes it really annoying to actually try to buy gift cards for gifts, because now when you defend yourself it sounds like you’re getting scammed…
Being more lax during the holidays would just make scamming easier.
I mean, my local Colesworth doesn’t really give a shit. I’ve seen people on the phone buying mass gift cards and had to step in because the staff just allow the purchases. I haven’t heard a warning over the PA/in-store radio for years now. YMMV but it’s still a problem around NW Sydney it seems.
The various scam phone calls that threaten jail time due to unpaid tax bills from the IRS (US) and CRA (Canada) is still thing.
It’s humorous when the Chinese/Indian call centers where they originate from mix up the countries when threatening people with the RCMP is coming to arrest an American or the IRS is coming for a Canadian.
However we are expecting these boomers that copy and paste status updates limiting Facebook rights use of their account photos and info at midnight over and over again to navigate these scams on their own.
To be fair much of the customer support for large companies have been offloaded to India and the Philippines so that’s one less barrier to overcome in triggering the BS detector of the not so savvy among us.
Oh sure, because we all read popups carefully. Nobody’s spent decades getting trained to go “yeah yeah yeah fuck off” at every modal dialog, and all of them have convenient ways to scroll back and double-check what they said after you’ve sent them into the void.
In NZ it was definitely a think for a while, but I haven’t heard anything about it in years now. Now even over the speakers in the aussie owned supermarket 🙂.
The various scam phone calls that threaten jail time due to unpaid tax bills from the IRS (US) and CRA (Canada) is still thing.
It’s humorous when the Chinese/Indian call centers where they originate from mix up the countries when threatening people with the RCMP is coming to arrest an American or the IRS is coming for a Canadian.
However we are expecting these boomers that copy and paste status updates limiting Facebook rights use of their account photos and info at midnight over and over again to navigate these scams on their own.
To be fair much of the customer support for large companies have been offloaded to India and the Philippines so that’s one less barrier to overcome in triggering the BS detector of the not so savvy among us.
Whenever I get these calls I do my best at keeping them on the line for as long as possible.
One thing that REALLY bothers me about these scripts, is that at some point, they’ll get the “RCMP” to call you, and they’re able to spoof the number of your local police station on your caller ID.
Whatever call-proxy service they use are BIG time complicit, and would be under jurisdiction of Canadian law enforcement. If they’re the only people Canadian law can touch, so be it, prison.
Even just basic KYC requirements would annihilate the ability of these scam shops to operate with impunity, and we know the government knows how to pass those per industry because it took like 15 minutes and a crayon to get it done for Bitcoin.
Yeah I think it’s time for the government to ban unauthenticated calling and slap a million dollar penalty on any telecom that lets one through per call.
This happens in America too! My friend is a 30-something software engineer and a high pressure tactic had him trying to pay taxes with Amazon gift cards. He must have ignored a mountain of red flags
“DO NOT REDEEM!!”
“Aw the poor scammers need money, here’s all of my savings, have a good day!”
Are iTunes gift cards even a thing? Wouldn’t it be Apple Music now?
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