I just wondering…
Did anyone really pay the ‘Federal Student Tax’ to the scammers?
seems you’d have to be awfully naive to pay an income tax using an iTunes card!
It happens more than you can imagine. It is usually related to the IRS scam.
A friend got a call supposedly from the IRS saying he was going to jail,if he didn’t pay what he owed. They asked that it be paid in ITunes cards!
Right…just what the IRS would be asking for…
Darwin was wrong.
Reminds me a bad memory. I used to receive calls from U.S. Federal Department of Grant that wants to grant scholarship to my child. Awfully persistent forks with strong accents kept calling me 1~2 times per week for a few months.
I ask them how the weather is in Bangladesh.
We all pay the federal student tax because of the high default rates
Sadly kids are falling for this and other scams like it. The cases I have seen have asked for money to be wired or they will be dropped from their classes. Finally saw a case a couple of months ago where the Walmart employee noticed a scam in progress and had the student hang up the phone. My S campus police does their best to warn the students but the kids don’t go to the presentations and don’t read email.
There is an app- not sure if I can name it here- that you can install on your phone to block these kind of phones. You can also block them one by one as you get them.
I think MLM and other common scams for college freshman are should be officially taught in high school. There are enough materials to make it a semester courses. Maybe they can even combine them with logical thinking curriculum.
My oldest son’s former employer, a lovely woman whose first language is Italian, fell for a scam involving a phone call from the electric company saying her service to her restaurant would be terminated immediately unless she paid $800 in gift cards at Walmart. To this day, my son is upset that he was off that day and wasn’t the one who answered the phone. We’ve warned our kids about scams, my son never thought he had to instruct his boss, who is my age.
My mother-in-law got a call from someone purporting to be the same son calling from jail in NJ and asking for bail money to be wired. We had just spoken to mom about this type of thing! She said you don’t sound like my grandson, at which point the caller began to cry and said it’s because the police have beaten me, grandmother. Well, my kids NEVER call her “grandmother,” so that was a dead giveaway. She told them to call back in 5 minutes because she had to arrange for someone to go to the bank for her. Not wanting to hedge her bets, she called my H and demanded to know where my son was. It so happened that H and son were on a fishing trip together but my mil had to speak to him before she was really certain. Surprisingly, they actually called back! She then told them where to go. We tried to get the police to trace the calls but they cover their tracks so well that you can’t find them.
The best way to fight these scams is to publicize them and to share stories about the different types that come up.