THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 28

We have our special guest, Steve Weissman on today. He’s the CEO of Scamicide. com, where you every day they’re either releasing a new scam that you should be aware of or updating scams and what the next levels are, what the next steps are. So it’s almost like a daily vitamin that we should be taking to do everything we can not to get scammed. Absolutely.

So important to the consumer. You never know who to trust. I mean, going online and just looking at different things and you try to Google reviews and you never know who to believe anymore. It’s just it’s awful. So this is perfect information at a perfect time of year, especially during tax season.

So this is absolutely amazing to have him back today. And I know as a counselor, you know, a lot of the scams lead to identity theft. And I know as a counselor, you have dealt with people and Cambridge Credit Counseling, the show has dealt with people that that’s lives have been turned upside down as a result of identity theft. Right. I believe we talked about this recently about the poor woman who called in.

She wanted to refinance her house and then found out that her her own son took out credit cards in her name without her knowledge. And it’s just a mess. It’s a mess. Have you heard the advertisement for the company that wants to help you prevent your deed title fraud where people are actually going online because a lot of the records are electronic. They’re actually going, taking the document, altering it, taking out loans in someone’s name.

And the next thing you know, they find out later that they owe all this money and they either have to try to protect themselves and reverse the process or they potentially lose their home. Where do people have the time to figure this out? I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s not the it’s not the space we live in.

The space we live in is working with consumers, getting them the information that we need and having them be wise. Right. So it’s things like this that people need to learn to look out for. And I’m excited to have our special guest, Steve, on today to talk with us about it. I’m going to take a quick break.

Sponsor message and show return

This is the Cambridge Connection. I’m Gordon Oliver, your host. We’ll be right back. Hi, I’m Christopher Viale, president of Cambridge Credit Counseling. Have you been receiving possible scammer phone calls or emails about your student loans, your mortgage or rent or any other calls suggesting they’re about money you owe?

Before you respond, call us at 1-800-CAMBRIDGE and talk to one of our certified counselors. There are lots of scammers gaining illegal access to credit reports these days, and it can be difficult to separate the scammers from legitimate services like ours, where the counseling is truly free and where we work with you to create a plan to pay down your debt safely and responsibly. Call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE today to find out how we can help you. 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome back, everyone, to the Cambridge Connection.

Guest introduction and background

I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie, who seems to be sulking today a little bit over the loss of chocolate, and I am a little unfocused staring at said chocolate. I see you like to rub things in, too. Maybe a little, just a little. It’s chocolate after all. I’ll give you that.

I’ll give it to you today. All right. It’s my honor and privilege to welcome our special guest, Stephen Weissman, who’s the CEO of Scamicide, and we’re going to talk about tax scams. Steve, welcome to the show. We’re so grateful to have you back.

Oh, always good to talk with you. So, Steve, for our listeners, before we get into some of this information, can you please tell our audience who you are and what you do? Sure. com, where every day we provide a newly updated alert in regard to the latest scams, identity theft schemes, cybersecurity developments. We were pleased to be honored by the New York Times, which named us as Scamicide as one of the three top places for information about COVID scams.

So this is what I do. You should be recognized. This is just important information because, unfortunately, we know people fall prey to all kinds of scams all of the time. So for you to go out of your way to create this website and this information to protect consumers to the best of your ability, truly grateful for all that work that you do. Thank you.

Tax preparer scams discussion

So, let’s talk about tax season and tax scams. I saw an article that was on January 7th where you’re talking about tax season startings and there are phony tax preparers that commit all kinds of crimes doing tax returns, falsifying information, etc. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, this is a real problem as far as tax preparers who are not legitimate. And you know, the tax code, it’s called a code quite efficiently because the fact is sometimes it’s very difficult to decipher.

So people will rely on the so-called experts, but sometimes what happens is you will have people preparing your return and they will put in information that is incorrect and fraudulent and get a piece of whatever refund that is. You know, perhaps one of the most outrageous incidences of this has been a thing that still is a problem. This is the reparations to the African-American community. And what happened is, at the end of the Civil War, there was a bill before Congress to provide I think it was 40 acres and a mule to the freed slaves. But the bill never got through.

And people still kind of think that maybe it did. So what these scammers, and they generally are African-Americans scamming the African-American community would do, is they will go in and say there’s a secret program the government doesn’t want you to know about, whereby you can get money reparations. And I will help you for, just you’ll have to pay me to prepare the return, and then I’ll take a small percentage of the money that you get. What made this even worse was the fact that for a period, the IRS didn’t do a very good job of auditing and actually sent people money for this, and then had to go after them. But what the scammers were saying was, see, it really does work, and the IRS is just trying to cheat you.

The IRS now takes the position, as far as this scam goes, at one time they were more understanding of the individuals who fell for it. But now they will actually bring civil actions against anyone who files a return or has a return filed in their name claiming this bogus reparations amount. So the bottom line is you really have to be very choosy about who you are picking to prepare your return. With that said, can you offer any tips on how to identify the fraudulent? You know, I would say more the other way.

It’s kind of tough to identify the scammers, but the things they have in common is they’re not usually the companies that you’re familiar with, the H&R Blocks and others, the TurboTaxes. They kind of turn up in the neighborhood or online, and you can’t find much of a history about them. You also, you do want to check the qualifications. You want to see if this is someone who is an accountant, a CPA. So the IRS will have a list of people who are authorized to file returns in your area, and you can go to the IRS to check on that.

The best thing is to stick with the legitimate names and not try and save a few dollars by going with someone that you can’t check out their legitimacy. So are you saying if they’re not on the list, don’t use them? I would say if they’re not on the list, you would have to review them a bit more carefully. Sure. Look into it.

Yeah. I have a couple of things here. So the first thing for our listeners that I can correlate by listening to you, Steve, and watching your articles, there are some common denominators that come with scams. Number one, a tax preparing scam company is never going to give you a return that says you owe $3,000. Right?

That is for sure. Because you’re not going to spread the name, you’re not going to pass a referral, you’re not going to say, oh man, I went to this place and I got all this money back. So number one, if it’s too good to be true, it most certainly is. And if you recall, Steve, we’ve talked about the student loan scam. It was very similar where the document production service falsified information to make the borrower feel like they got a comfy, cozy, low payment.

And then upon fixing that, obviously the real truth came out. And unfortunately, again, for our listeners, if you’re desperate looking for great results when it comes to tax prep as a special one or even student loans, the bottom line is whatever the result is going to be, it’s going to be. And more importantly, you should be looking for advice from your tax planner on what to do the next year if you don’t want such bad news. So when scammers operate, they’re operating either to steal information or provide something that makes you feel like you got a really good bargain or a really good deal or a really good result. Yeah.

And I agree with absolutely everything you said. You know, another thing as far as being able to identify some of the scammers who are preparing taxes is that many of them won’t sign the return as a preparer. And if your preparer is not willing to sign the return as a preparer, that’s more than a red flag. That’s a red sky at night and it’s no sailor’s delight. You go away from them.

The other thing is you may go with the local preparer of taxes and this person may indeed even be legitimate. But you touched on an important issue, Gordon, and that is you’re providing this person a lot of personal information that could lead to you becoming a victim of identity theft. And so you have to be sure that the person or the company with which you’re dealing, and it may be one of the first questions you ask is, how are you going to secure my information? Because if somebody is just the corner accountant, they may not be encrypting the data. They may not be segregating the data.

They may not have proper security. And quite frankly, even the big time accounting agencies, all of them are targeted by scammers. At the bank, Robert Willie Sutton once said, why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. The personal information is at these tax preparers.

So they are huge targets for identity thieves. And you want to make sure, even if you’ve got a legitimate one, that they’re protecting your info. Yeah, it’s funny. Even though you see major companies having data breaches, Experian, Target, Citibank, while you might have the attitude, well, if the big companies are going to get hacked, everybody’s going to get hacked, you certainly don’t want to make the opportunity easy to have your identity taken and utilized in dark places. So even though it happens, you still have to do your best as a consumer to protect yourselves, and certainly voluntarily offering information is something to steer clear from.

Yeah. You don’t want to be the low-hanging fruit. All right. Listen, we’re going to take a quick break. Steve, please stay with us.

Break and co-host introduction

I know we have a lot more to talk about, and not enough in the 28 minutes we have on the show. So we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back to talk a little bit more. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. Hey, all. It’s Tina Marie, and you might know me as Gordon Oliver’s co-pilot for The Cambridge Connection every Saturday morning.

What you might not know is that I’ve known Gordie for a really long time, and as a certified credit counselor at Cambridge Credit Counseling for over 20 years, I am thrilled to join Gordie every week to share and chat about real people with real financial problems, along with me and many success stories both myself and all of the counselors at Cambridge Credit have been a part of. We know it takes a village of support and inspiration if someone is struggling financially, so it’s nice to know if that person is you, that you’re not alone out there. 30 AM right here on WHMP for The Cambridge Connection, because Gordie and I, we are here to help you have a better relationship with your money and hopefully make you smile. Right, Gordie? Couldn’t have said it better myself, Tina Marie.

Income tax identity theft and dark web

Welcome back to The Cambridge Connection. I’m Gordon Oliver, your host here with my co-pilot Tina Marie and our special guest Steven Weissman talking about tax preparation scams. So Steve, what else can we warn our listeners about when it comes to tax season, tax preparation, finding the right resources of people that are legitimate versus the ones that are trying to scam you? You know, probably the biggest tax crime, and this is a scam that the IRS has had a great deal of difficulty in combating, is income tax identity theft. Income tax identities have to occur when a criminal electronically files an income tax return using your social security number, which they can get on the dark web where after data breaches this information is sold by criminals.

They also can get it from stealing your wallet or myriads of ways. So they file an income tax return using your social security number with a counterfeit W-2 that’s going to get them a big refund. And often you don’t realize you’re a victim until you file your legitimate return and find out the IRS says there’s already been one. Now this year is going to be, unfortunately, the perfect storm as far as income tax identity theft because just looking at the number, the number of income tax returns filed in the last 10 years has gone up by 19%, but the budget of the IRS has gone down by 20%. The IRS is underfunded, understaffed, and uses what they euphemistically call legacy computers, which just means old.

And in fact, even as at the end of December, the IRS still hadn’t even processed 6 million income tax returns from last year. But one of my mottos is things aren’t as bad as you think they’re worse. If you try and call the IRS, which I did about a month ago with an issue, the IRS last year returned 32 million phone calls, which sounds pretty good until you realize they received 282 million calls. The problem is that the IRS is overwhelmed. It could take you easily a year to get your refund.

There is one really good thing that people don’t generally know about to protect yourself. The IRS started about 10 years ago putting in a program recognizing that your Social Security number is out there. So for people who are victims of identity theft, they can get a pin, a six-digit pin that would be on their income tax return. Now it has been expanded to everyone, and I really urge everybody, even if you have not become a victim of income tax identity theft, get this pin. You have to get it each year, but it works.

And where would you get the pin from? Is this something from the IRS website, something that your preparer can give you? How do you obtain the pin? Really easy, Tamarie. You just go to the IRS website, and they have a special section there where you can apply and get the pin.

So it’s a pretty simple thing to do, and that’s not often a sentence I use when referring to the IRS. Simple? Yeah. Yeah, and so Steve, also for our listeners, I think one of the most important things to understand is in the advertisement world, we’re in the digital age, and data is important for these advertisers to make money to advertise their services. And I think what some people don’t recognize is their data is actually worth gold in the dark web.

So not only does a scammer try to scam you for various different services and monies, but they also sell that information for a lot of money in the dark web so that other bad actors can do the same type of thing to a consumer. Oh, yeah. And that’s the business model for much of cybercrime. For instance, last year, hundreds of millions of dollars of unemployment funds went to scammers. And not surprisingly, it sounds like a cliche, there was an organized cybercrime group in Nigeria that was the biggest purveyor of this scam.

And what they did, Gordon, is exactly what you said. They went into the dark web where the guys that are the cybercriminal geniuses put together the malware that they’re going to create these data breaches and then steal all of this personal information. So they did that. They put it on the dark web. The Nigerian gang paid for that stolen information and then used that to electronically make claims under the various states’ unemployment benefits.

And then they would have money mules. These are people who would get the money because they’re obviously not going to file an application and, say, send the money to the National Bank of Nigeria. So they have people in the states who will receive that, sometimes even mixed scams. So you’re aware of the romance scam where someone falls in love with you immediately on an online dating or social media, and then they start asking you for money. Well, in this case, the scammers in Nigeria were turning their victims into accomplices of the crime, saying, I’ve got a problem with my account.

Money’s going to be sent to you, and then wire that to me. Or in other instances, these criminals put up offers of work from home jobs, which ended up being just transferring the money, and people never knew what they were doing. But you’re absolutely correct. The personal information is the coin of the realm, and it’s available to criminals on the dark web quite readily. And for those listening, if you’ve never been through the process of being scammed or identity theft, it is truly grueling.

So not only are you potentially out money and assets, but the path to get back after you have to lock all of your information down, the path to get back to normalcy is somewhat painful. And that’s why giving this information to try and have people understand, they have to be aware of it, they have to kind of know what it looks like, and they have to do everything they can to protect that personal information. Yeah, it really can hurt you. And you know, as you said, it can be very, very difficult to get yourself back. And even when you do kind of create a better identity and get your identity back, there are times that the fraud comes back onto your credit report.

And I was an expert witness with law firms that were responding to the Equifax data breach, and we were looking at all of the problems and the money that’s expended and the time to fix your problem. But it’s even worse than that. Because someone can have your identity, commit a crime, jump bail, and then suddenly you get stopped because maybe you got a taillight out, and you’re going to spend the night in jail because the records show you’ve committed a crime. Or someone has stolen your medical records, and they access them. Those are the most valuable on the dark web.

Your medical history will get mixed in with the criminal who is using your insurance. You potentially could even get a wrong drug of something you’re allergic to, or even a wrong blood type, because their information’s mixed with yours. It’s very scary. Yeah, and the webs that are weaved on all the directions that this stuff can take is just incredible. And again, until you’ve been through it, you don’t have any idea how bad this can get if you’re really not doing everything you can to protect yourself.

It’s like regaining your identity all over again, proving you are who you are. And that does not happen in five minutes. No. So Steve- It’s easy for them to take it, but it’s not so easy for us to prove who we are. That’s what I tell people in debt.

Wrapping up with guest resources

It’s easy to get into it. Exactly. Well, at least you help provide solutions to get out of it, right? Right. Well, Steve, listen, our time is coming up, and before we let you go, can you please tell our listeners about Scamicide again, where they can find you, and how they can interact with the website?

Yeah. com is the website, and it’s free. You can get the newsletter, and you can enroll in. And every day you will get the scam of the day, and it’s a place where you can find out if the Federal Trade Commission is giving back money to victims of scams. We’ve got that there.

What to do if you’re a victim of identity theft, we’ve got the forms there. So I suggest to people either, you know, check it out each day or just become a member and it’s free and you’ll get it in your email every day. So we have medical professionals that have been taking care of people during the pandemic that we obviously pay great tribute to for all the work that they do. We have people that do missionary work to help volunteer for projects and people that really need services and assistance. And then we have you that your work cannot be regarded enough to try and protect people.

And we’ll do everything we can to make sure people are aware that the website exists and that the work that you do is incredible. So we really, really admire you and appreciate everything that you do. I appreciate that so much. And, you know, the work you guys do, I’ve been aware of it a long time and I am in awe of what you guys are doing as well. Steve, thanks for joining us.

I’m sure we’ll invite you again in the future. Hope you’ll come back on. My pleasure. Thanks, Steve. I’m going to take a quick break.

This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back. The key to protecting yourself from scams, cybercrime and identity theft is education. com comes in. com is the brainchild of attorney and Bentley professor Steve Weissman.

com provides daily up-to-date information that you can use to avoid the latest scams, identity theft schemes and cybersecurity threats. com was named by The New York Times as one of the three best sources for information about coronavirus related scams. com today and subscribe for free to receive a Scam of the Day alert or check out Steve’s books, Identity Theft Alert and The Truth About Avoiding Scams. Because as Steve says, BS means be skeptical. Welcome back, everyone.

Success story and show closing

This is The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie. Man, Steve, all right, we’re going to shift positively here for the Cambridge Credit Success Moment so we can hear some wonderful things after all of those warnings that we just dealt with for tax scams. I am so happy to be able to deliver some good news, too. So as you know, I work for Cambridge Credit Counseling.

We’re a nonprofit credit counseling agency and we help consumers nationwide. And I just wanted to share a thank you letter, if you wouldn’t mind today, that one of our consumers sent in. And this is how she starts. Hello, my name is ER. I want to say thank you for helping me back in 2019 when my family and I were going through a financial hardship.

Your guidance and support really helped us. I’m writing to let you know today we finally paid off the last credit card balance. And even though last year I went to surgery and was off for two months, living on a budget has helped us save for those days. I believe in God and I know God made this possible. I also believe in doing what’s right and paying off our debts is the right thing to do.

Thank you again, Mr. Scarfo. He’s a counselor at Cambridge Credit. Thank you again, Mr. Scarfo.

God bless you. You’re a blessing to our family. So the work that you do is a certified counselor. These are, you know, it starts with we do that real people, real problems segment where we’re going over the problems that people are having. And this is the other side of the rainbow, right?

This is the end result of what the counseling does for people, how they feel at the end of it. They’re empowered. Sure. When they initially come to us, they’re typically very overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do.

Their heads are spinning. In debt, something, you know, out of control. And by the end of it, it’s so rewarding to receive a letter just like this, knowing that we’ve helped someone obtain their financial independence. So this is a wrap up of the show this week. This is the Cambridge Connection.

If you would like to connect with the show, feel free to email connect at Cambridge Credit dot org. com under podcast to listen to this episode and past episodes or where you find your favorite podcasts. And again, if you’re looking for assistance with credit card and unsecured bills, feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.