Scam CRA phone calls

[CarltonTheBear]

Anybody else receive one of these lately? I was left a voicemail from the number below after just 1 ring on my work phone, I'm not even sure how they got to voicemail that quickly. But anyway this was the message that was left in one of those automated/robotic voices:

I am calling you from Canadian Revenue Agency. We have received legal complaint on your name in regards of tax fraud.

As we are trying to reach you for months and months. So before anything goes wrong with you, you or your retained attorney need to call us back on 844-850-3567 again at 844-850-3567.

If you want to save your dignity to being good citizen of the country, or else. You are the best judge of yourself.

Now, that's a word-for-word transcription, so yes all of those great sentence fragments and stuff were really what was said. I knew it was a fraud immediately, so the part at the end where they get all judgemental in what I assume was terribly translated english had me in stitches.

 

[riff raff]

We got this call a couple of months ago. I had the phone number and I was going to pass it along to the anti-fraud department of the federal government, but their website made things so complicated I just gave up. There were too many too specific questions. What was needed was an open-ended form that would allow you to put in what had happened in your specific case. This phone call didn't fit into any of the possible occurrences listed.

For some reason, I just couldn't justify (to myself) calling the local police about it, although that was probably the appropriate route to take.

 

[hockeyfan1]

Everyone should be aware at all times.  Scammers will resort to just about anything... such as the one I received through the mail -- little yellow postcard size letter alerting me to a $500 gas card win.  I ignored the first few of these as they kept coming in, claiming that they couldn't reach me and that I needed to contact them by phone (as they needed some more details before I could claim my win).

Well, I sensed something wasn't right.  The amount of claimable winnings on these cards kept changing from $500 to $100 to $300, a gas card from any one of the major companies such as Shell, Petro-Canada, Esso, etc.
I had recently filled out a survey on Shell Canada's website with the potential to win a $100 gas card to be used at any Shell gas station. But if I had indeed won a Shell gas card I thought, it would have been sent by Shell itself via mail and I would have been contacted by them.

Anyways, I was very tempted to call the phone number provided on one of these postcards (which by the way, also kept changing with each individual one sent),  but hindsight told me to do some 'research' before even attempting, so I searched the web and voil? there it was -- someone had posted about these yellow postcards with claimable winnings and was warning others not to give in, it was nothing but a scam!  (The person herself had received them, decided to find out what they were all about and found that it was a money-grabbing scheme to get your personal details AND most importantly,  one's credit card number by telling the winner that they needed to subscribe first to a bunch of discounted magazines, etc., monthly fee and then they could have their gas card.  In other words, you'd give them all the details, they'd bill your credit card monthly and then you'd get your supposedly won gas card.  What these people really are after -- your credit card!

I hope no one out there fell for this trick.  I definitely didn't, thank goodness!

http://www.mynelsonnow.com/8017/local-post-card-scam/

http://www.highriveronline.com/local/28747-beware-of-free-gas-scam-in-your-mailbox