I received this phone call today:
I’ve been waiting all year for one of these, so naturally I returned the call:
I wasn’t entirely happy with that, so I had another go:
That got me nowhere. One more try, I thought. The language in this one is a little more fruity:
Myself, I get several such calls a week. If the telephone companies were made to pay for every penny of the losses to these criminals on the part of unwary people, they’d cease in a week, like turning off a tap. The technology exists to stop all such calls, but it would cost money and work to apply it. That would however be too much like real service to their customers.
Incidentally it’s been a mystery to me for years why if it is feasible to send money to fraudsters it isn’t equally feasible to recover it. Again, too much like hard work and expenditure on the part of the banks?
Dear David, Waytogo! Your effort and patience kept these vile foul mouthed scammers off the line for a while, keeping them from the harm they cause so many who fall for their con game. I await your next episode with anxious anticipation. Miss you and Sharon and hope to see y’all soon. Love Ya – Terry
Foul-mouthed scammers indeed! I’m quite sure even dear old Grytpype-Thynne and his sidekick Count “Jim” Moriarty would never have stooped to such language.
Seriously though, these people are about the lowest of the low, particularly as they prey on the elderly and those whose knowledge of basic Canadian civics is weak (such as recent immigrants from – shall we say? – countries where the state is rather more authoritarian).
Oh, and I loved the inspired use of JUSTIN TRUDEAU. As if anyone in the CRA would need to have that name spelled out.
I consider foreign-based scammers a threat to the well-being and security of Canadians; a more robust, bloody-minded state would “discourage” them through direct cyber warfare against their electronic signature.
Brilliant! Best entertainment I’ve had all day. Go, David!
Well, if the government won’t do anything about it, perhaps a grassroots movement will help. Maybe gather together all the numbers they are using, then hook them up to robo caller or demon dialer programs, on phones with blocked numbers for security, that will call those numbers repeatedly without end. Add any new numbers they start giving. I think that would “tax” their resources. Now, if it turns out that strategy is illegal (I am not sure why it would be, but these days, who knows?) then use your phone’s call forwarding function to forward all the calls from that scammer’s number to the phone number of another scammer. Then they can get all upset calling each other on the other side of the world. Of course, I don’t know what they will then try to do to your phone in retaliation. Quite clearly though, there are lots of things that could be done to stop, or at least severely limit, these calls.
I like it.
These scammers work outside of Canada or the U.S. and know they really do not face any consequences for their actions. People need to know and understand that the CRA does NOT contact anyone by telephone or internet and all correspondence is by mail. They target older people as we were basically taught that you can trust everyone. In today’s world that is clearly impossible.
As an addendum to this episode, I had a similar series of phone calls a few years ago (chronicled here).
These ended up with threats of violence to both me and my family, so I called the fraud department of the RCMP. They sympathised but said there was nothing they could do since the calls originate in India. The officer I spoke with even regaled me with similar experiences he had had. In his case, the female caller threatened to call his wife and tell her she was having an affair with her husband.
The phone number (which was local to me) used in this CRA scam is no longer in service.
If our government really wanted to fix this problem it would contact the government’s of the countries where these criminals are operating in and inform those governments that they have one month to shut down these crooks. If after this deadline the crooks are still operating then our government will order all Internet Service Providers in Canada to BLOCK ALL INTERNET CONNECTIONS with their country. And by ALL INTERNET CONNECTIONS I mean exactly that, including legitimate electronic money transfers. We would need to do this once, maybe twice, and the problem would be fixed.