So, ignore any emails or phone calls threatening immediate consequences unless you make immediate payment, and you'll avoid that scam. Mail – and they'll give you far more than an hour or so to resolve the problem. If you genuinely do owe back taxes, need to serve jury duty, or pay old utility bills, those notices will be addressed to you personally and arrive in the old-fashioned U.S. In all such scams, the easy rule to remember is that, even when these agencies do take punitive measures – such as the IRS going after tax scofflaws, or utility companies shutting off service for non-payment – they'll never, ever contact you over email or your phone. There's also a utility-company variant of this scam, where the scammers will threaten to shut off your electricity or other vital utilities within the hour for alleged unpaid bills. Other times they'll say they're from your local sheriff's office or police department, after you for skipping out on jury duty or “failure to appear.” Sometimes the scammers claim to be IRS agents, about to arrest you for unpaid back taxes. There's also a variety of phone- and email-based “arrest scams,” wherein the scammer will call or email you while posing as a law-enforcement authority figure who will arrest you and take you to jail that very day – unless you give him money for “fines” or “court costs” or what have you. Remember and follow that one rule, and you'll never be snared by the one-ring scam. ![]() If you return this call, you'll be connected to a high-priced chat line, “adult entertainment” line, or other pricey service located outside the country.īut it's easy to avoid the one-ring scam with a simple rule: never return a call from an unfamiliar number that leaves no message. Take the “ one-ring phone scam,” which is popular with a particular subset of phone scammers known as “crammers.” Crammers trick people into calling numbers with extremely high fees attached, by programming computers to call thousands of random phone numbers, ring once, and then immediately disconnect. Most modern phone-based scams are very easy to detect, so long as you memorize one or two simple rules. This is because the scammers' mode of operation is so disturbingly identical to the real thing. Of all the various scams which my colleagues and I have detailed here at ConsumerAffairs, the “collect call from jail” scam might be the single most difficult for certain potential victims to guard against. Is this really an incarcerated friend or relative of yours, or is it a scammer trying to trick you into running up false charges on your phone bill? ![]() Here's a quick quiz to test your scam-protection savvy: Imagine you're at home when your phone rings, and upon answering you hear a recorded voice saying that this call is from your local jail, and wants to call you collect.
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