By With the holidays starting next week, I’m sure scammers will be even more aggressive and annoying than usual. The question becomes what you can do about scammers once you’re their target. I wanted to find out. The information is just for my readers in the United States. For my international readers I suggest searching Google for how to report scams in your country as I’m sure there are ways to report scams worldwide. I hope the information that follows helps you and those important to you.
I’m specifically giving ways to report phone scammers in the US because that is what I needed to know. Everything is fine because my call block app caught the number as a scam before anything bad happened. For those who don’t know I use the free version of Hiya to block unwanted calls on my cell phone. It is available in both the android and apple app stores and works great. I’ve ben using it for several years now.
The first place to report a phone scam to Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Here’s the link with information about how to do that: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/phone-scams. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also a good agency to report phone scams to as well. You can do so at: https://www.ic3.gov/. If the scammer claims to be from the Internal Revenue Service you can report that to the US Department of Treasury here: https://oig.treasury.gov/report-fraud-waste-and-abuse. “It’s important to report phone scams to federal agencies. They can’t investigate individual cases. But your report can help them collect evidence for lawsuits against scammers.” (https://www.usa.gov/common-scams-frauds#item-37207) Most local law enforcement agencies have fraud departments as well, so you can report them to your local law enforcement as well if you want to do so.