It’s that time of year again, tax time!
This makes it a great time to attempt pulling off bogus tax scams like the one heard in this recording:
The IRS doesn’t make calls using robots and this recording is clearly produced with text-to-speech (TTS) technology. TTS is a way to type text and have a computer generated voice read what has been typed. The technology is much more advanced today than it was in the past with Alexa and Siri as some examples of the good. The scamers usually don’t have the budgets of big dogs so they use some free off the shelf products that produce a more robotic unemotional voice as heard in the recording above.
This type of scam works in two ways.
1) If you answer the phone or your voicemail/answering machine answers they know the number is legit and may add your number to another list of “working” phone numbers.
2) If you are lonely or just feeling guilty because you have cause for the IRS to file a lawsuit against you and actually do call back 315-303-8939 as requested in the robocall recording you will be added to another list of gullible numbers to run more scams on in the future.
I never called the number for more information about my IRS lawsuit and have to assume nothing good would have come from it.