Scam robocalls rise; victims lose millions

"I'm calling from the IRS, you owe us thousands of dollars on your taxes. If you don't pay it now, the local police will come to your house and arrest you."

Millions of people living in the US have received this type of robocall with someone pretending to be the Internal Revenue Service, as the deadline for filing US taxes — April 15 — looms.

"What happens is that these people will tell you, 'I'm from the IRS, and you owe us money, you have to pay it right away by debit card, bitcoin or by wire'," Claire Rosenzweig, president of the Better Business Bureau of New York, told China Daily.

"If they say they're from Social Security, they might say that your Social Security number has been involved with a crime. It's not true. The main thing to do when you get a call like that is to hang up," Rosenzweig said.

Nearly 48 billion robocalls were made to US residents last year, according to a Federal Communications Commission report released in February, and nearly 50 percent of those calls were from scammers.

The report also noted that the number of complaints about illegal robocalls has been increasing, jumping from 172,000 in 2015 to 232,000 in 2018.

YouMail, a company that collects and analyzes calls through its robocalls blocking service, estimates that last month alone there were 5.23 billion robocalls made to the US phone numbers, the most ever in one month. 

Robocalls are also a global problem. Last year there were an estimated 85 billion calls globally — an increase of 325 percent from a year ago — with scams involving bank accounts, credit cards and extortion being the most common, according to a report by Hiya, a company that makes apps to thwart unwanted calls.

The US Federal Trade Commission says the 35,000 victims of robocall scams in 2018 lost about $10 million. Among 1.4 billion fraud reports made last year, more than one-third involved impostor scams, and government scams cost the US nearly $488 million in total, according to the agency.

Rosenzweig said the reason that people still fall for scam robocalls is because scammers are good at scaring people. "They depend on a person being so frightened that they're going to act right away by doing whatever the scammer wants them to do," she said.

"Immigrants can be easy targets of scammers because they are afraid of being arrested and getting a criminal record," Kathy Liu, a lawyer based in New York told China Daily. "Especially for those who are on their way to becoming a US citizen, they don't want to get any criminal record."

Since December 2017, a robocall scheme targeting people with Chinese last names, in which the caller pretends to be from the Chinese embassy and demands money, has garnered more than 350 complaints and fleeced victims for $40 million, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center.

US lawmakers have taken note of the surge in scam robocalls. Last week a Senate panel advanced legislation that would increase the fine on scam robocalls and give the federal government authority to fine offenders up to $10,000 per call.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that despite issuing fines of more than $208 million, the federal government has collected less than $7,000.