Eating lunch the other day with my co-workers at our bungalow-turned-home-office, I got interrupted by a phone call from someone claiming to be from my TV service company.
Tired of the scammers, I asked the guy on the line about the weather there and then told him how we could fix his air conditioner if he put $500 on a gift card for Home Depot and then told him how he’d need to read me those numbers.
“Come on,” I egged him on, “you know how to do this. You’ve been telling people how to do this for years.”
Yeah, the pandemic can drive you a little over the top. My son, the accountant, and my husband, the editor, just shook their heads. My son later told me: “Great mom, now the guy’s going to get back at us by filing a fake tax return.”
And so it has come to this: We are either getting scammed by these guys or getting worked up when these guys keep calling. And yes, we wonder what they might do next.
Now that it is tax season, scammers will use one scheme after another to craft stimulus scams, file phony tax returns to steal tax refund cash or stage some drama to scare us into handing over our Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and cash.
The best advice remains to simply hang up the phone on scammers, and don’t engage with their texts.
The three rounds of stimulus payments offer consumers financial relief during the pandemic, but they also give scammers another storyline.
Amy Nofziger, director of victim support for the AARP Fraud Watch Network, said one…