On Q Professional Investigations

CHICAGO (WLS) — A warning for taxpayers as tax day approaches: Some scam artists are using phone calls to try and take your money.

Thousands of complaints are pouring into government offices just days before the April 15 tax deadline.

The Federal Trade Commission says it gets about 10,000 complaints a month – and that’s just one agency.

The IRS fraudsters are using spoofing technology and blocked calls to steal your money. But there are ways to catch the person on the other line.

A viewer recorded and shared a scam call with the ABC 7 I-Team; it’s one of thousands of IRS scam calls hitting the Chicago area and nationwide. During the call, a woman demands money after claiming that back taxes were owed. Consumer protection groups say it’s getting worse during tax season.

“I got a blocked call from someone who was claiming to be the IRS and was talking to me trying to get me to pay him some money over the phone and was threatening me that if I did not pay it, they would press charges. And I would be arrested,” said Mordy Siegal, who received the call.

Siegal says he used technology from a service called Trap Call to uncover his blocked number and prove that the fake IRS call was coming from New Jersey.

“He told me he was out of Cleveland and the call was coming out of New Jersey so I knew it was a fraud,” Siegal said.

A Trap Call basic plan will run you $4.95 a month. There are also other technologies that advertise similar, free services.

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Snapchat is growing up, joining the ranks of its older tech giant predecessors when it comes to openness.

The 4-year-old ephemeral messaging app took a big leap this week by releasing its first ever transparency report and unveiling a sophisticated slate of new security features.

From Nov. 1, 2014, until Feb. 28, 2015, Snapchat said it received 375 requests from law enforcement for information in the United States. The company reported complying with 92 percent of those queries.

The release of the transparency report brings Snapchat in line with common practices used by Google, Facebook and other large technology companies and will be updated bi-annually.

Along with the report, Snapchat announced it would roll out a slate of new initiatives to ensure users’ silly photos and scantily clad selfies remain private and unable to be grabbed by third-party apps.

Among the new features are a bug bounty program that will offer incentives to coders around the world who flag any potential vulnerabilities in the app.

Snapchat also vowed a complete shutdown of third-party apps, many of which have been used unscrupulously by Snapchat users to grab and save photos that friends sent to them with the intention of only showing them for a few seconds.

Snapsaved, a third-party app, was hacked last year, resulting in thousands of private photos and videos being posted online.

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The Defense Department has rolled out supersecret smartphones for work and maybe play, made by anti-government-surveillance firm Silent Circle, according to company officials.

Silent Circle, founded by a former Navy Seal and the inventor of privacy-minded PGP encryption, is known for decrying federal efforts to bug smartphones. And for its spy-resistant “blackphone.”

Apparently, troops don’t like busybodies either. As part of limited trials, U.S. military personnel are using the device, encrypted with secret code down to its hardware, to communicate “for both unclassified and classified” work, Silent Circle chairman Mike Janke told Nextgov.

In 2012, Janke, who served in the Navy’s elite special operations force, and Phil Zimmermann, creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP, in short), started Silent Circle as a California-based secure communications firm. The company is no longer based in the United States, ostensibly to deter U.S. law enforcement from seeking access to user records.

But that hasn’t stopped the Pentagon, a longtime Silent Circle apps customer, from buying the Android-based blackphone, which came out in 2014.

The “wild thing about it is, we’re a Swiss firm,” Janke said Monday. “Our phones aren’t produced in the U.S., but because of the fact that [DOD] can test our phone in a lab — they can look at the code that’s open source — they’ve been testing it for a year now and using it.”

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