How I fight back against IRS scammers

Every call I get on my phone is a scam. I haven’t gotten a real call in what seems like years. My mom Facetimes us and my kids text so I know that when a Brooklyn 646 number pops up its someone trying to give me Medicare funded braces or a great line of credit for my fish pornography business, FishPix, which, apparently, their systems now think I run.

But the worst folks are the IRS scammers. Their ploy— which is deeply cynical and cruel —is designed to frighten people with few resources to give up their cash. The people they call receive a recorded message that threatens you with jail (they usually threaten to send the “cops”) if you don’t pay your IRS fines. They then ask people to go to to drug stores and send them iTunes gift cards or the like in order to “pay their fines.” The calls are completely bogus but, as one scammer told me, they often convince suckers to send them thousands of dollars.

“We got one of your people to send me $1,000,” one of them told me last night.

Right.