Burlington Police Have Fun At Phone Scammers' Expense

BURLINGTON, MA -- Police departments throughout Massachusetts have been warning residents who call people posing as the Internal Revenue Service in an attempt to get them to turn over personal information that can be used to steal their identity. The scammers, who often employ threats of jail to coerce the people they call, have been hitting area towns. But in Burlington, logging the calls in the police log wasn't enough.

In a series of posts on Twitter Monday, someone with a sense of humor at the Burlington Police Department often a running commentary of their attempts to call the scammers back. "Annoyingly... the scammers must know that we like calling them and messing with them so they are hanging up on us," one of the Tweets read.

The police eventually got one of the scammers on the line and posed as John Johnson, who is married to Betsy, and asked the scammer for help filling out their form 1099-D-U-M-M-Y. "They finally hung up after arguing over important things like the correct paper weight and color, staples vs paperclips, blue ink vs black ink," but not before threatening to arrest Betsy Johnson, Burlington Police reported in a Tweet.

The series of Tweets was a fun way to raise awareness about a serious issue. The IRS distributed the infographic above to help people spot scams.

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Top image by Internal Revenue Service.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).