B2 – Upper Intermediate
Mumbai, India – Around 70 Indian call center representatives were arrested last week in different raids in several buildings across the city. The suspects allegedly call Americans and demand them to pay the money they owed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and threaten to send the police to arrest them should they fail to pay up.
Listen to the audio and read the transcript to find more about this telephone scam.
http://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/india-us-scam/3548899.html
Discussion Questions:
1. How were these callers able to deceive people?
2. What are ways to identify whether this kind of phone call is a scam or not?
3. Talk about things you know about taxation in Spain.
4. What are other phone or internet scams do you know of?
5. Why is paying taxes important?
14 replies on “Indian Police Make Arrests”
1 – They are presenting themselves as IRS workers
2 – None administration worker will require to pay them the taxes by phone or prepay cards
3 – The taxes in Spain for employees is an annual mandatory contribution that depended by the total salary obteined in the year. Normaly, the employers retraired a part of the salary to pay the taxes, and the employees must be present a form (Rent Declaration) to convalidated that all the payments are correct.
4 – Phishing or Smshing – Send you email or SMS text you to obtain your data or credentials. Sometimes you can receiv a call from some company to change one of the suministrs (phone, electricity, gas) with fake offers
5 – The taxes are important to sustain and improve the services publics on out country (sanity, education, transports, etc). The incremental sections system make that the people who charge more pay more (in theory….)
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1. These callers were able to deceive their victims by impersonating workers of the IRS, which is an agency to collect income taxes.
2. To my mind, this sort of agency doesn’t threaten to call policeman to collect income taxes. Usually these kind of agencies are used to getting the taxis by other formal ways.
3. In Spain it exits a lot of taxations and it is mandatory to pay them even though there are people who don’t pay their taxes. As consequence, they have to pay a fine or even authorities send them to prison.
4. Fortunately, I have never suffered a scam. I have known some cases of fraud when the media have published several scam. In Spain, in general, older people tend to suffer this kind of scam.
5. Because taxes allow goverments to improve several aspects of its countries such as education, sanity and social problems.
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1. The callers were able to decived because they pretended to be workers of the Internal Revenue Service and the threatened to send police if the victims didn’t pay.
2. The agents of the IRS never threat with send police or ask forn inmediatly pays.
3. In Spain, like in others countries, you can find differents kind of taxes. For example, every product or services that you can buy or consume has a percentage of price added for taxes. An other way to collect taxes is on the earnings of each worker because a percentage of these are used for taxes.
4. Lately there are many cases of phishing in which a suscicius email or sms seeks that you share your bank accounts.
5. Taxes are the goverments way of raising money, this let the goverment to offer necessary services like education or healthcare to citizens
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I think that one of the most important aspects for the callers to deceive in this kind of business is to know the regulations and laws of the target country where these organizations are acting. Therefore, it is for sure that these people are being supported by others inside the country which will inform them to whom address, what to claim and how to threaten. Another point, is that the callers should seem like native speakers, so that nobody can suspect that the call is a fraud.
People should be very cautious about both phone calls and e-mails they receive every days. We are living in a very aggressive world where there are people dedicated to deceive so as to earn money easily. Not only illegal organizations but also many big and well-known companies try to catch new clients no matter the way. Before giving the credit card it is important to assure oneself on the veracity of the call/ message.
As many other countries around the world, Spain uses the taxation as a way to maintain all the public services: education, healthcare, pensions…There are two types of taxation: indirect and direct taxes. Some of the indirect taxes include VAT, transmission of properties or circulation taxes ( for vehicles). Regarding to the direct taxes, they tax on a person’s capital and rents.
The latest scam I am living right now (I am receiving the same call every week) come from UK number. They are supposedly from the support service of Microsoft and they have detected a misuse from my computer. They pretend that I follow their instructions to give them the remote control of my computer. As soon as I tell them that the conversation is being recorded the call is hung up.
Taxation is important from the point of view that it helps to keep the standards and wealth of the country, offers services to everyone such as education, well-being, ..However, there is a bad perception of this concept. If the collected money were used in a responsible way there would not be so much trouble to support the maintenance of the country. The problem is that much of our money is given for useless things.
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How were these callers able to deceive people?
Callers acted like they were Internal Revenue Service agents. They were trained to sound like American natives. They called people threatening them to send them the police if they did not make payments electronically ranging between $500 and $3000
2. What are ways to identify whether this kind of phone call is a scam or not?
IRS do not threaten people
IRS agents do not request to make payments electronically
3. Talk about things you know about taxation in Spain.
We have different taxes:
• VAT: When you buy stuff, the VAT is added to the product price
• Personal Income Tax: Based on your earnings, you must pay a percentage to the tax office
• Inheritance taxes: When something is bequeathed to you, you must pay a taxation
4. What are other phone or internet scams do you know of?
Phishing: Fraudulent e-mails to get your bank
CEO scam: Offenders get access to a boss e-mail and send to employees to send money to their bank account.
Ransomware: Criminals paying employees to help them to hijack the IT systems. The systems got blocked and crackers ask for money to make the data and systems accessible again.
5. Why is paying taxes important?
Paying taxes makes the people feel responsible about the common things.
It also allows the society to have good public health and education services, among others.
Taxes allow the government to offer grants and internships to students with difficulties. Society can have good doctors, teachers and other professionals that without that help wouldn’t have been able to go to the University.
Infrastructure can be built and maintained with a budget paid with taxes. Street’s illumination and cleaning are also paid a budget that also comes from our taxes.
Firefighters’ salaries are also paid with taxes.
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How were these callers able to deceive people?
These callers would deceive people by impersonating themselves as US citizens, specifically as employees of the IRS, which is the public department that is responsible for collecting taxes. They used social engineering to deceive people along with other techniques like the sense of urgency and authority to make them pay the fake fines.
What are ways to identify whether this kind of phone call is a scam or not?
It depends on the caller, they usually don’t prepare the scam and they should do, and you can notice that in their accent, in the way that they ask for your personal information, or even in the plot itself. If it sounds fake, it is very possible that is fake.
Talk about things you know about taxation in Spain.
As far as I know, taxation could be done in different ways, either by paying taxes directly by bying products or by declaring your salary, charges and benefits in the anual tax declaration. I guess there are other ways of taxation, specially for autonomous people (those that work for themselves) and businesses, no matter their size.
What are other phone or internet scams do you know of?
The first internet scam that came into my mind is the one that ask you for a small amount of money that could allow scammers to unlock a huge amount of money that they would share with you. The real thing is that there’s no huge amount of money, you’re their treasure.
Why is paying taxes important?
Taxes allows governments to manage country’s anually budget, this involves everything, from defense budget to civil servants’ wage. It’s really important provided that politicians are efficient enough to manage this budget, which unfortunately it’s a requirement that is not met over the years and population has the feeling that politicians not only manage poorly the budget but they also take advantage of such power to enrich themselves.
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1. How were these callers able to deceive people?
Supposly, they had been calling US citizens, and identifying themselves as Internal Revenue Service workers, asking citizens to pay for the owe money.
2. What are ways to identify whether this kind of phone call is a scam or not?
First of all, I think that IRS never asks citizens to pay something on a phone call, probably, they send a mail or something similar and the phone call, when necessary, use to be as a friendly reminder or a confirmation if the mail was received.
3. Talk about things you know about taxation in Spain.
As I’m not a spanish citizen I’m not sure about internal rules, but I know that once a year citizens have to fullfill a form and if corresponds receive extra money payed during the period or pay for the owe money.
4. What are other phone or internet scams do you know of?
A fake kidnapping
A fake employee ask for the password restore
5. Why is paying taxes important?
I don’t know (kidding)
It’s supposed that the amount of money received from taxes should be used to for improvements, sanity, social benefits, etc.
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