Day: February 7, 2018

Wednesday, February 7th, 2018 —> -18˚C / -1˚F & Sunny & Clear @ 9:09 am in Atlantic Canada —

– Canada Revenue Agency’s Fraud Alert Page –

— The above is a screenshot, Don’t try to click on any links –

— A close friend told me yesterday that some evil scammers were calling senior citizens in Canada and telling them that the Canada Revenue Agency has a warrant out for their arrest and they better call an “800” number to resolve this immediately.

— Apparently, a dead give away is the fact that the telephone messages do not begin with the name of the person the CRA is supposedly attempting to contact.

— Another dead give away is the Caller ID with some of these calls – begins with a foreign country’s identification code number before the ‘800’ number.

— My friend told me he received a call from a distraught 80 something year old senior citizen telling him he’d received a call on his generic answering machine { with a robotic voice saying “Please leave a message” and nothing more } claiming the CRA had a warrant out for his arrest for Tax Fraud and Tax Evasion and threatening legal action and jail time *** But – the old guy was sharp enough to realize the phone number didn’t look right – it began with “011-855- [ xxx-xxxx ]” The old guy wondered what the extra numbers meant and what he should do, and repeated several times that he ( this senior citizen ) had never committed any ‘Tax Fraud’ and/or ‘Tax Evasion’ that the call accused him of committing. The “011” prefix means the call originated outside of Canada, probably in the USA – and when asked, the old guy said, “No – they never said anything like “This is a call to ” [ Name ] ” – it just started telling him, “The CRA has an arrest warrant out for -‘you’- [ …. etc. ].”

— My friend told his older friend that the call was a scam, made by somebody who is trying to scare anybody they can into calling the number they told them to call at which time they would try to scare anybody who called them into giving them private information, maybe even giving them a credit card number with the ‘secret code’ on the back – so the scammers could charge the limit on that card and hope they were untrace-able and could get away with that kind of fraud. My friend told his older friend to erase the message and ignore it.

— If it really was the Canada Revenue Agency, their caller ID would say “CRA” and maybe more –  and if there really was an arrest warrant out for him they would have been knocking on his door, not calling him on the phone like that.

— [ *** But – on the CRA Fraud Alert Page – farther down below the above screenshot – there is a warning that a Caller ID display can easily be ‘spoofed’ into saying anything. ]

— And apparently the senior citizen is losing sleep over this anyway, terrified he’ll be dragged out of his home in handcuffs and locked up somewhere.

— Schnarr!

~~~~~ Jim