Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
I believe it was in 2019 that I got called by the honest-to-goodness Canada Revenue Agency telling me I owed ~$3.6 million dollars in taxes from my last tax return year. The caller ID was nondescript so it could have been anything, and those robotized 'the RCMP has a warrant for unpaid taxes' scam calls were en vogue. It was so absurd that I laughed and said "Sure, hold on a minute, I'll buy those iTunes gift cards right away for you; you guys still take those, right?"
It wasn't until she started confirming my personal information like address, employer and previous employer, SIN number, previous return amounts, etc. that I went white as a sheet and could feel my butthole pucker as the government was poised to do something very nasty to it.
Thankfully a (panicked) phone call to Locke revealed that someone had woefully fat-fingered something at the Winnipeg Tax Centre to make it look like I'm making Steven Stamkos money, and a quick resubmission to correct the error brought my taxable income (and blood pressure) down to normal again.
JonDuke's wife was right to be skeptical, since so many bad actors will find ways of socially engineering whatever they need out of someone (PepsiFree aside, he hasn't been bamboozled since that first time in 1984 when his uncle pulled the "Got'cher nose!" trick) and I think the CPS officer could have acted a little more professionally to convince Mrs. JonDuke that they weren't acting nefariously. Even just changing the way the question was asked could have been more disarming.
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Yeah. I have to answer the phone for business reasons and get at least a couple of calls a week from someone claiming to be a government agency or law enforcement. If the actual government wants people to take it seriously on the phone they need to figure that out.