Kyle Roder received an urgent message on his cellphone from a man purporting to be from the IRS. A message was left for Roder saying if he did not call back immediately, he would be arrested for fraud. A video of Roder’s call back, made at the station while he was in uniform ,was posted to the Eau Claire Police Department’s Facebook page and has since gone viral.
The man asks Roder for his case file number. When the officer replies he does not have it, the scammer demands his address. Roder said he had already been told he would be arrested and asked how the sheriff’s office could arrest him if they don’t know where he lives.
After Roder asked for the man’s name and badge number he is given a number and told the man’s name is James Maxwell. Roder smiles at a colleague, no doubt because the man’s accent was not one you would expect from a James Maxwell. Later in the call, Roder asks for his name again and is told it is James Johnson. When confronted with this inconsistency, the scammer says his name is James Maxwell Johnson.
Roder asks who is going to arrest him and is told it will be the local sheriff. At this point, Roder is approached by a fellow officer waiving a pair of handcuffs. Roder asks when he will be arrested and is told he only has today to take care of the problem. The officer then asks if today means 24 hours or up until midnight and is then told he has only until the office closes for the day. There was a bit of hesitation before the scammer came up with what “today” meant.
The officer asked the scammer if he can simply go down to the local IRS office and take care of this and was told he cannot because they don’t have his file any more. The file has been turned over to the scammer’s department. When Roder suggests he will contact his local office to confirm the caller’s name and badge number, he is told his local office will not have that information; only his department has it.
After Roder questions whether this is a scam, he is told it is not and the IRS does sometimes make phone calls such as this. The video ends with Eau Claire County Sheriff Dan Henning telling viewers this is truly a scam. Henning said the sheriff’s office does not receive information from the IRS or execute warrants based upon phone calls such as this.
Roder told People, the IRS does not cold call people and threaten them with jail if they do not immediately pay up. He also said the best thing for someone who receives a call like this is to just hang up. The longer someone stays on the line, the more chance there will inadvertently reveal personal information the scammer can use.
Since the Eau Claire Police Department posted the video a few days ago, it has been viewed more than 5.4 million times.
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