Bucks County In Bullseye of IRS Scam Callers

The phone at the Doylestown offices of the Bucks County Department of Consumer Protection rang off the hook Thursday. The calls were almost all about one thing: the IRS phone scam.

Bucks County Department of Consumer Protection Director Michael Bannon said his office received more than 200 complaint phone calls from area residents by late afternoon.

Bannon’s office isn’t alone in reporting calls from residents complaining about the scam calls where the person, usually a foreigner, on the other end threatens the victim with a lawsuit if they do not pay a certain amount of money or provide them with their Social Security number. Levittown-area police department’s say they are experiencing an influx of calls about the scam.

“Never give out you Social Security number to anyone over the phone. The IRS does not need your Social Security number. They already have it. They are the ones who issued it to you, Falls police Lt. Hank Ward said. “Please, do not become a victim.”

Ward and Bannon both had the same advice for what to do if you receive an IRS scam call: “just hangup the phone.”

IRS officials said in a statement that they will never call taxpayers to demand money and urged people to hang up on the scammers.

The rise in the IRS phone scam in our area is due to the ease of robocall systems that allow scammers around the world to hit an area code in a short amount of time. Bannon said the scam works and consumers in Bucks County have lost an untold amount of money.

“I would say it’s the most successful telemarketing scam of all time,” Bannon told LevittownNow.com.

At a meeting with the FBI last year, officials said the majority of the calls come from overseas and hit so many numbers at once that telecommunication companies see a spike in huge usage on their system. This spike is due to the use of  top web collaboration tool from Cleod9 Voice, which is also used by various businesses. 

Each week, the scammer hit a different set of phone number and then move on. Currently, the crooks appear focused on the 215, 267 and 610 area codes. As soon as the weekend, the majority of the scam calls could be focused on other area codes in a different part of the country.

“The bad guys have learned to work these robo-machines and they’re very successful,” Bannon said.

Under the threat of deportation or arrest, immigrants in the country illegally have received the IRS scam calls at an alarmingly high rate, several readers have told LevittownNow.com. Fearing that they will be removed from the country by the federal government and with little desire to report the calls to police, they pay up to the scammers.

Bannon said his office is hearing unauthorized immigrants and immigrants here legally are receiving a lot of the calls.

“It appears they are being targeted.”

Bannon also urged local residents not to talk or call back the scammers.

“The best thing to do is not to talk to them. If you answer, they can increase number of calls because they know there is a live person,” he said.