TL;dr: If you get a phone call from 201-515-3126 saying it’s the IRS and they’re contacting you regarding a lawsuit, it’s a scam. Do not call the number back, do not engage.
When the New Year rolls around, US citizens begin to figure out their taxes for the prior year. Some people with simple returns are able to file their returns in early February while others with more complex ones — or if they’re just lazy — wait until the last minute. Living overseas like I do you’re granted a two-month extension automatically, whoo hoo! Oh yeah, this is also the time of year scammers will do their best to hijack your tax return or trick you into turning over some of your hard-earned dough!
True story: This morning (4:12am my time, 12:12pm PT) I received a phone call on my USA number, waking me up. Without thinking the only thing I could do at that ungodly hour was to dismiss the call without answering it, especially since the caller’s number was not one I recognized.
Upon rising for the day, I checked my phone and saw that number again and thought it seemed a bit odd. The caller left a voicemail message, so I listed to it:
I rs. Is filing a legal warrant under your name and your tax id for the tax fraud and the investigative team of our department is investigating you and your family. We had tried to notify you regarding these issues in Previous 6 months, but we had never got a response from you, so it has been considered as an intentional fraud and lawsuit has been filed under your name by the United States government you may call our department number on 201-515-3126. I repeat. It’s 201-515-3126. Thank you.
Yes, that was the entire message. (And no, I did not type all that is. Google Hangouts, which I use for text messaging and voicemail for my USA number, will transcribe voicemail messages and you can access them via Gmail or the Hangouts website. All I had to do is load up Gmail and copy the transcribed text.) What was really strange about the voicemail message, besides receiving it, is the phone number the message tells me to call.
Area code 201 is from northern New Jersey. Don’t know about you, but I thought the IRS is based in/around the Northern VA/Washington DC area. Compounding my skepticism at this point, the phone call I received this morning was listed on my phone as 925-663-2512 and there was another entry in my call history from the day before from 925-266-5886. Both of those numbers are from Contra Costa County, which is near Oakland and San Francisco, CA. How do I know where those area codes come from? Easy: LMGTFY (Let me google that for you…) 201, 925.
I entered the phone number listed in the voicemail, 201-515-3126 … it’s a scam
Fully well thinking now this is a scam and that the IRS is not trying to contact me regarding a lawsuit, I entered the phone number listed in the voicemail, 201-515-3126, into Google and looked at the search results. It was more than obvious from the search results that the associated phone number indicates that it’s a scam.
Go ahead and do a Google search on your phone number and compare it to the search results for 201-515-3126; guaranteed you’re going to see vastly different results … and if you don’t, go change your phone number now as your number might be listed as a scammer!
So yes, even living overseas it is possible for fraudsters to attempt to contact you and steal your money or hijack your tax return. Be careful out there. Here’s a short list of ways you can help determine if something is a scam or not:
- Google it and see how often others report on the same issue
- If you’re told to call a phone number, don’t. Call a number you know of for that company or government office and ask them if the number you’re told to call is one of theirs. (This often happens with credit card companies.)
- Do not click on links in emails if you cannot verify the email came from a trusted source. One easy way to do this is to hover your mouse over the link and see if the link will direct you to the company’s actual website or if it looks like a fishy one.
- Never give out your personal information over the phone, via email, or through a website.
If you’ve had scammers contact you in similar fashion, hopefully you did not fall prey to such miscreants and let me know about it by leaving a comment!