A 28-year-old Stanford University woman was scammed into paying a bogus tax bill with $8,000 in Apple gift cards on April 17, said police in Tualatin, Oregon, where the scam allegedly began.
The woman received a phone call between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m from a man who claimed to be from California. He allegedly told her he was an FBI agent helping the Internal Revenue Service collect scholarship taxes and that she was facing a warrant for her arrest, Tualatin police spokeswoman Jennifer Massey said.
The man told the victim that she needed to pay the IRS by government vouchers, which were in the form of Apple gift cards. While the victim talked to the man, he instructed her to purchase the gift cards through a phone application. She gave him the Apple card numbers, which he was immediately able to utilize, Massey said.
“Someone went into the store in Tualatin and used them. The suspect made a bulk purchase of phones,” she said.
Tualatin investigators have made contact with a 32-year-old man who lives in the city but he has not been arrested at this time. Police currently don’t have enough evidence to show that he knew he was involved in a scam, Massey said.
“He claimed he was just a third person working for someone, and he was just told to go and buy the phones,” she said. Tualatin police are still investigating leads, however.
Massey said this is a common scam. People often obtain the cards by deception and frequently “wash” them by giving the cards to other people to buy additional gift cards, which makes them less traceable. Investigators have to trace the cards backward to find the perpetrators, she said.
Massey did not know if the victim is a current student.
“It’s a good question how someone knows if a student has a loan” or if they have received a scholarship, she said. “They might have connections with people at the student loan office. Working in rings becomes a lucrative business.”
She did not know if police suspect any ring at Stanford.
Stanford Department of Public Safety spokesman William Larson said he was not at liberty to discuss the matter, as the Tualatin police have taken over the case.
Anyone with information about this case can contact the Tualatin Police Department at 503-629-0111 or tip line at 503-691-0285.
“The man told the victim that she needed to pay the IRS by government vouchers, which were in the form of Apple gift cards”
OK…
I HATE these scams!
Please advise those who trust you – share about these scams in specific terms. I don’t mean throwing it out there along with everything else on the wild world of the net, where we can trust very little, sadly – as this is a less impactful action.
I am really worried about our naive teens and young adults – most of whom are way too open and trusting.
We MUST have politicians/government officials and industry executives work to reduce these crimes.
Example: phone services whether landline or cellular – spoofing, abuse, scams, threats, impersonating police/IRS
Prosecutors must be enabled to better research and prosecute scamsters on the net and on phones
I think government agencies need to be a lot more aware and proactive because they do set people up for these things. If they call people about sensitive matters but don’t make it easy for people to hang up and reach them through easily verifiable channels, they are making people more vulnerable. If they fail to get rid of ludicrous, punitive practices, like the state extracting hundreds or thousands of dollars from ordinary Californians just for sending a warning letter to file their taxes when the citizens are owed a refund (California requires filing within one year, not the three the feds allow, and will fine after 18 months even if citizens are owed money. The state still levies the warning letter fine even though the late filing fine was deemed unconstitutional, and a late warning letter fine would be on the same grounds. This is further exacerbated by the way CA changed withholding under Schwarzennegger to basically loan itself people’s money, which Brown never undid.) When governments do unreasonable things that ordinary citizens feel helpless to counter, it sets the citizens up to be vulnerable to unreasonable scams like these.
The scammer knew lots of info about the woman, which is how the government and many financial companies still convince people they are legit when calling. Worse, the same gov/corp entities will call, give enough info to make the purpose seem urgent, then ask the person for personal info to verify that it’s them before convincing them that it’s legit by providing them more private info. Again, the legit entities really should have to be more responsible about the vulnerabilities they create. It wouldn’t be difficult to improve things but unfortunately companies and government agencies enjoy taking advantage of confused consumers, too. There are books about the deliberate overwhelming and confusion tactics used by companies to get windfalls they don’t earn, basically no better than such scams.
@Consumer, don’t forget the $5000 threat for not replying to the Census Bureau’s intermittent community survey form, which asks 14 pages of personal job, commute and habit questions.
Here I thought someone from Stanford would be more intelligent than to fall for such a blatant scam!