Scams, Hoaxes And Bilking People In General
I have talked about hoaxes and scams before, but the reason I am mentioning them again is they seem to be more prevalent this month than ever. Maybe it is because of the holiday season or maybe that has nothing to do with it, it is bad enough when it happens, but it is getting out of hand now. Let me give you an example. In the three days before I wrote this article I have received at least six phone calls from people claiming to be the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The first two calls claimed I was being sued by the IRS for non-payment of taxes. Calling on the phone must be a new way for the IRS to notify someone, right? No wrong you would never be called by them this way. The next four calls stated I was being given a last chance to come up with the cash. It is sad to think some people actually will fall for this scam. When they contacted me they were dealing with the wrong person because many years ago, before computers were in every home I was contacted by the IRS and told to bring cash to an IRS inspector’s office or he was going to put me in jail. I told him to try it and never heard anymore until I got a letter many months later from the IRS apologizing. They had arrested this IRS agent who was trying to shake down people.
Just for fun I went to the IRS website which had a warning about this type of thing right on their home page. They suggested all these calls should be reported and gave a telephone number. Trying to be a good citizen I called the number and got a message telling me there was an extremely long wait time before anyone would be able to answer. You know what I was told it was, the old your call is very important to us so we will be with you as soon as we can and you sit on the line for half an hour. Well needless to say I hung up. I am very willing to be a good citizen, but the government agencies have to be good agencies and make it easy to report these things. They want you to do something, but then make it so hard to do, people get disgusted. I do not understand why these calls cannot be traced. Perhaps they are being, but are out of our jurisdiction. I suspect this is really the case. The United States has become a target not only for terrorism, but for what used to be called bunko. Perhaps this is also a way for the terrorists to raise money?
The next thing that happened was I got an email stating it was from the FBI and I was being investigated, of course I could buy my way out of this by paying a large fine. I bet you didn’t know the FBI or Federal Bureau of Investigation accepts what seems like a bribe. Well they don’t and they also wouldn’t send you an email if they were going to investigate you. You would either know nothing about it, or they would either subpoena or arrest you. If these schemes didn’t work on some people these crooks would not continue to send out these emails or make these telephone calls. I once heard someone say since it is so easy to do a bulk email, you could easily send out a million emails and get a least a few suckers. I guess sucker is too harsh a word, because some of the victims are the elderly or people who may have emotional problems. There are others though who actually fall for this sort of thing.
The last thing I got was another email, but this time it stated it was from PayPal and thanked me for purchasing an expensive object from some supplier I never heard of. The email warned me the purchase could still be cancelled right away if I clicked on a certain link, but I only had thirty minutes to do it. Yeah, sure I am going to click on some poison link. You may wonder how they could prevent someone from going to PayPal to check out the order. The email explained it might take a while before PayPal posted the sale. Supposedly this would cover the fact it was not listed when checked. The last few days were just a barrage of scams and I have to marvel how nothing is being done about it. A government is supposed to protect its people, but it seems we are all being left to our own devices. Think about this, the government has lost our critical data so many times and yet no one was ever punished and it seems a lot of the data was never even encrypted. There are no laws to protect our data when it is in the hands of companies which are constantly losing our information and endangering our identities. There are no treaties with the offending nations which allow criminals to prey on us. We just don’t seem to count for much except for making good cannon fodder in the constant wars being conducted by us.
As far as scams go they seem to come in three varieties. There is the email scam, the telephone scam and the snail mail or ordinary mail scam. The ordinary mail scam is not as common, because it costs money and stamps are expensive. For years email scams have been sent out which proclaim that someone who works for a bank or big oil company in another country has a lawyer in the US who is contacting you because they know you are an honest person. They then go on to say the person the lawyer represents has made millions of dollars, but can’t leave the country with it and would like you to take the money and hold it for him for a very generous fee, maybe a million dollars or so. If you reply, then they tell you they need a small fee for the lawyer and if you send it, the next thing they need is a larger bank transfer fee and so on. Many of us have seen these letters. There is also a letter addressed to a guy with the photo of a beautiful girl who wants to meet an American. As you get to know her she asks for money for a ticket to come here from her country and may ask for money for other things. You will never meet her.
I have said this before and I will say it again, we need treaties with the other countries in the world which will punish people criminally for sending out scam emails, foreign phone calls and even letters from foreign countries which are looking to bilk others from their hard earned money. A crime is a crime whether committed against citizens of one’s own country or not. As far as criminal schemes perpetrated by Americans against Americans, the laws must be enforced. The United Nations should earn their money and do something about this stuff when it is between countries.
