Okay but this is serious, I work in retail and I had a lady come up and ask for 2 $500 Google play gift cards. We have been trained to look for these scams and to warn the customers NEVER give the card numbers over the phone unless you have met this person face to face. I told the lady this and she started crying, saying they were the IRS and that if she hung up they would call the police and have her arrested. They wanted to keep her on the phone so she couldn't call her husband, who was more aware of how the IRS works. I was able to convince her to hang up and call the police on *them* instead, and saved her $500.
Scams are serious, people lose a lot of money and older people are targeted the worst because they're easy targets.
First of all, the IRS will *never* call you and ask for money, and they definitely won't call the cops on you. They'll get your money if they really want it through taxes.
But now they're trying to target our generation using crypto, which is super hard to trace if the money gets lost. So they're getting smarter, and they'll use whatever they can to get you to give them money.
What you really need to know or take away from this is: NEVER, and I mean EVER, buy a gift card and give the barcode number on the back to someone over the phone. It is ALWAYS, 100%, a scam!
Please be safe and hang up on these fuckers the second they ask you to buy a gift card.
there's a guy on twitch and youtube that calls these scammers to lead them on and waste their time, kitboga. more people also do it but this is the guy I've watched
he'll describe the scammer's tactics as they use them, especially in his youtube videos, and he says he does it because his parents got scammed, and when you're old sometimes you have to rely on people over the phone because of things like dementia
treating them like they're dumb does them a disservice and makes you more likely to fall for it because "I would never fall for a scam like this!" leaving you unprepared for the anxiety and fear these scammers can induce in you!
They can mimic people's voice now. My dad got a call from someone claiming to be my brother, using a technology that was mimicking his voice, saying he was in a car crash on the way to work and needed bail money or something. My brother was at work and we couldn't contact him (luckily my mother works at the same company and was able to pull strings to find out he had made it to work and was safe). My dad was so shaken up that he wasn't fully sure if everything was okay until my brother got home. My dad ended up calling the police and letting them know so they could look into it.
These scammers can be fucking scary. They will prey on you, and make you feel terrified and full of anxiety so you aren't in your right mind to think about it.
apparently they get a short clip of your voice either from something you posted online or from calling you directly and feed it into an AI (or at least that's what I'm finding online). that's fucking scary
they did it to my coworker pretending to be his daughter saying she'd been kidnapped which is, most of all, really messed up and evil? bad enough to be a scammer but why do it in the cruelest way possible
