After U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill called for increased law enforcement action to combat an emerging scam in which individuals impersonate IRS agents, five individuals have been arrested for perpetrating that scam.
The arrests came after a tip made to the Aging Committee’s fraud hotline. Sen. McCaskill is the ranking Democrat on the committee.
“These predators make people afraid to answer their own phones and prey on people’s sense of responsibility—they deserve to go to prison,” said McCaskill. “We need more aggressive action taken against scam artists like this, and I hope this is the start of many arrests for perpetuating this scam.”
According to the court documents, the suspects are responsible for nearly $2 million in schemes that defrauded more than 1,500 victims.
Thousands of Americans have been victims of a telephone scam in which criminals claim to be IRS officials and threaten victims with legal action or arrest unless immediate payment is made. The victims, many of whom are elderly Americans, have lost millions of dollars as a result of this scam.
According to government figures, at least 400,000 Americans have been targeted with this kind of scam, with several thousand having been defrauded out of a total of nearly $15 million dollars. This figure includes $112,000 that has been stolen from 36 Missouri victims. More than 10,000 attempted scam calls are being placed every week.
McCaskill, a longtime advocate for preventing IRS identity and other scams—last year led a hearing on preventing phone scams and the IRS impersonation scheme, which officials have called the “largest, most pervasive impersonation scam in the history of the IRS.” According to government figures, this scam, which has targeted hundreds of thousands of Americans, has cost victims of $23 million in less than two years.
At a recent hearing, McCaskill said, “If you get a call from the IRS out of the blue, don’t answer it—let it go to voicemail.” The IRS has developed that same consistent messaging, however, last winter Congress passed two measures that would upend that message by making it far more likely that consumers might confuse a real IRS call with that of a scammer. Those measures required the IRS to employ private debt collectors, and to allow those debt collectors to use robocalls for debt collection. McCaskill strongly opposed both measures.
McCaskill also backed bipartisan legislation that would repeal the legalizing of IRS robocalls by requiring callers to have the receiving party’s consent before making automated calls or texts for collecting debts owed or guaranteed by the federal government. The bill is supported by several prominent consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of American and Consumers Union.
McCaskill recently requested from the IRS a plan on how the agency intends to crack down on identity theft scammers who are stealing consumers’ Identity Protection PINs in order to file fraudulent tax returns. These PINs were originally intended to deter fraudulent filing by thieves who may already possess an individual’s stolen personally identifying information.