Many of you might have noticed that several IRS and SSA scammers play an intercept message “Call Rejected” when you call them.
Let me explain what this is.
There's somewhere around 2 to 3 dozen scammer operations behind the IRS and SSA scams. Nearly all of them are using a cloud-based VOIP switch. When this scam first got legs their phone switches were wide open so it was fairly easy to swamp them. Since each boiler room only has about 2-5 people actually answering the phone a raid would quickly soak up all the available agents and then new calls would go on hold until one of the agents hangs up so the next call in queue can ring.
Point any simple autodialer at their phone number and it would cause their phone queue to explode.
Many of you think "Call Rejected" means the scammers are filtering the caller IDs that come in based on a list they know they dialed out. Well, I can put that to rest. They don't have the programming skills to do this.
Instead, most of these scammers simply disable the queuing option on their ring group. A ring group is a list of phone extensions the system will try to connect an inbound call to. If it can't find one you can have spillover calls be dealt with any way you wish. To hear "Call Rejected" you would have selected to terminate a call if it can't find an agent in a ring group.
What that means is that if you keep trying the number you will eventually reach an agent. If the scammer hangs up and you dial back IMMEDIATELY, the agent will pick up the phone again. However if you don't change your caller ID quickly enough to confuse the scammer, another call may ring through and you might hear "Call Rejected" again. Or you can just dial back immediately---but the same agent that just hanged up on you (and who now is free) will notice that you rung back immediately, and he will likely continue the conversation where it left off.
So, don't let "Call Rejected" get you dejected and dissuade you from trying the number. You don't need to change your caller ID to get them to answer---you just need to continue calling.