For my non-Aussie friends, the ATO = Australian Taxation Office.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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The scam is just someone calling and telling the person they need to buy gift cards (from other comments, presumably to pay a tax bill)?
Yes, and it works with enough people for it to be an ongoing scam for a decade at least.
If I had to guess it's closer to two decades. They used to do it (may still) with reloadable Visa and MasterCard. Due to TV shows making getting audited by the IRS a huge deal and being told the government is coming for their money for decades, old people fall for this scam. Most of them have taken the standard deduction their whole life and have had someone else doing their taxes for years, but they're terrified that the tax man is gonna throw them in the hoosegow. It's the same reason a lot of children are frightened that they'll catch on fire a lot as an adult or that quicksand was going to be a huge deal. Stop, drop, and roll was beaten into us. Quicksand was a problem in an episode of almost every cartoon and many live action comedy shows we watched.
That's in the states. I have to assume it's the same in at least some other countries with shit tax laws. If we'd update to a better tax system that scam would go away in just a few years.
Great explanation, plus that is the first time I have ever seen hoosegow spelled out!
Stop drop and roll is actually the one thing that people should learn, because in the general population a large number of people do catch have their clothes catch on fire and need to be able to put it out the right way.
If you’d like an explanation/in-depth look at how this scam works, I’d heavily recommend checking out this guy’s videos where he baits scammers live with voice changing hardware and wastes as much of their time as possible. They’re enlightening and very funny.
Yes, they also do ones where they say they are from Microsoft and even make viruses that make scary red pop-ups with their call center numbers. Some of them even remote into boomer’s PCs with like AnyDesk or GoToPC and they like show them the Task Manager and find like a svchost instance and say “ SEE THIS IS BAD, WE MUST REMOVE THE VIRUS! You can pay now, use Google Gift Cards”
There are even some that make it look like they accidentally transferred money into the person’s account (they get marks to open their bank portal and they literally edit source in front of them sometimes) and then they say”oops! Oh no, I messed up! My boss is gonna be so mad! My family, they will go hungry! Oh please, you must help me get this money back! Do it with gift cards so they won’t catch on!”
Kitboga is a famous streamer who gets these guys on the line and does characters to waste their time, and it’s quite informative about the kind of stuff they do