Online Security at IRS phone scam finally may be fizzling out

We all should be thankful on this Thanksgiving Day that one of the worst scams to hit the Lehigh Valley, and the nation, finally is on its way to being cooked.

Complaints about the IRS phone scam have dropped significantly in the past month or so. After three years, international detective work and technological advances finally have carved deeply into these turkeys' business.

The scheme isn't completely stuffed away yet, so remain vigilant. But it's certainly not as prevalent as it was.

The relentless calls started in fall 2013. Con artists pose as IRS and U.S. Treasury agents and threaten people with a lawsuit, arrest or grand jury investigation unless they immediately pay supposed tax debts.

The debts aren't real but the callers bully people into paying over the phone, usually with prepaid debit cards and iTunes cards. More than 9,600 people, including some locally, have lost a combined $50 million. A California man lost $136,000 when he was exploited repeatedly over 20 days, according to the U.S. Attorney General's Office.

I heard from hundreds of people who got the calls. Some were scared. Others were confused about whether the calls were legitimate. Many knew they were fraudulent and wanted to know how to stop them or where to report the scoundrels.

Nearly 2 million complaints about the scam have been reported to the Inspector General for Tax Administration. It's also the top scam complaint to the Better Business Bureau.

But it's been a month or more since I've heard any complaints. Reports to the inspector general and the BBB are way down.

That's because some of the people accused of making the calls have been locked up. Early last month, authorities in India raided a call center and charged 70 people with fraud. On Oct. 27, U.S. authorities announced that 56 others had been indicted; some of them in the states, along with five call centers in India.

"We are encouraged that our investigation, which resulted in the announced law enforcement action in late October, has had a significant impact on this criminal activity," inspector general's spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar told me.

At the peak of the scam, more than 30,000 calls were reported to the inspector general in a single week. That was down to about 1,000 in one recent week.

People still are being ripped off, though, and the inspector general recently learned of 40 people who lost money, Kraushaar said.

"It is extremely important that people remain vigilant and remember to hang up on callers who claim to be IRS or Treasury employees and make threatening calls demanding immediate payment," she said.

In about the past month, the Better Business Bureau's Scam Tracker website has received 91 reports of tax fraud, compared to 489 the previous month. While those figures include all types of tax scams, the vast majority are IRS scam calls.

"We are pleased with the drop and are looking forward to the day when we aren't getting any IRS tax scams reported," said Kelsey Owen, communications and public affairs director for the Better Business Bureau office that covers eastern Pennsylvania.

There are variations of these scam calls. Sometimes the callers are men. Sometimes they are women. Some calls are live while others at least start as robocalls. Callers often instruct victims not to tell anyone about what's going on and to remain on their cellphone while they are buying the prepaid cards to pay their supposed debt. The callers try to sound official, sometimes offering badge numbers and case numbers. But their foreign accents often give them away.

In addition to the arrests, technology also played a role in reducing the number of calls getting through.

As I reported in a recent column, a new technique being developed by phone and technology companies to block illegal robocalls stopped a substantial number of these scam calls during a test.

While this is all good news, I fear the fraud could catch a second wind. Schemes as profitable as this often morph into new ones. The Better Business Bureau also warned of that.

"We know from past experience that scammers are opportunists," Emma Fletcher, manager of the BBB's Scam Tracker, said in a news release last month. "Hopefully this crew won't be stealing from anyone again for a long while. But we will be keeping an eye on incoming scam reports so we can alert consumers what the 'next big thing' in scams turns out to be."

The IRS phone scam already was evolving prior to the raid in India. John Miller of Bethlehem Township told me he got several calls in late September from the "Office of Taxation" that followed the same script.

"I guess they gathered that everybody has figured out the IRS game so now they're trying a different name," Miller told me.

If you get an IRS scam call, you can report it to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (800-366-4484, www.tigta.gov) or the BBB Scam Tracker (www.bbb.org/scamtracker/us).

Protect yourself against scams by reading my previous Watchdog columns at www.mcall.com/watchdog. If you are targeted with a new scam, let me know and I'll warn others.

The Watchdog is published Thursdays and Sundays. Contact me at watchdog@mcall.com, 610-841-2364 or The Morning Call, 101 N. Sixth St., Allentown, PA, 18101. I'm on Twitter @mcwatchdog and Facebook at Morning Call Watchdog.

The Hay Group Singapore on Pharma deals don’t have to threaten innovation

In pharma, the big story of the spring and summer has been M&A. The drama began in April with an asset swap between GSK and Novartis. The most recent headline grabbers have been inversion deals like AbbVie’s $54 billion acquisition of Shire.

All this deal activity is a potential threat to innovation. Why? During a deal, it’s easy to overlook the intangible drivers of development: people and culture.

Deal mania makes it easy to forget that people and the way they work together are the main drivers of innovation. Drug development is a team sport, and the way the players interact is a major factor in achieving success. Too often, deals break up environments that have made innovation possible.

M&A integrations also create atmospheres of anxiety within a company that dampen R&D productivity. When layoffs occur—or wind of them blows through an organization—people focus less on their jobs and more on job security. The threats to innovation don’t end there:

· R&D budgets shrink, jobs are cut and research projects dry up.

· Researchers have to adjust to a new team and a new work environment.

· When two distinct research cultures merge, it can destroy delicate ‘ecosystems’ of climate and culture that support scientific discovery.

Integration doesn’t have to harm innovation. But you have to stay focused on people.

So with our most recent white paper “Keep your innovation from walking out the door” we want to share three key people strategies to keep innovation rolling.

Source: http://blog.haygroup.com/

Writing Service Level Agreements of Axia Consultants

10 tips for writing better Service Level Agreements

1. Ensure all key terms are clearly defined eg SLA scope, customer and provider responsibilities, reporting, service expectations, performance indicators, escalation, remedies and penalties. Make sure you understand them. If you do not, or have queries – ask!

2. Include the option to change the SLA in the future. Businesses and technology change rapidly. So if the SLA is to remain relevant, it will need to be updated as required.

3. Include the provision for regular SLA reviews. Six-monthly would be ideal, but failing that - annually, to manage changing circumstances.

4. Make sure you have a ‘get-out’ clause. It is important to be able to terminate the SLA under certain conditions eg exceptionally poor performance, major problems, significant changes to services.

5. Include performance-monitoring criteria within the SLA. Plus, include automatic penalty credits for non-compliance of performance. Better to build this into the SLA from the start, than negotiate each time it occurs.

6. Writing the SLA should be a joint effort between customer user and IT staff and the service provider. Input and agreement from all is required. One party should not dictate or force SLA terms on the others!

7. Allow sufficient time to prepare, negotiate and agree, a comprehensive and relevant SLA. The quality of the SLA is improved by not rushing and taking more time, whatever the project time pressures.

8. Look out for exceptions within the SLA. Ensure you understand them and their potential impact on the overall SLA.

9. Look out for third party components within the SLA. Ideally, one service provider would provide the entire service. However, there may be input or reliance from other third parties. So check who is responsible for what, and whether it is included or excluded from the SLA.

10. Carefully review your SLA. Make sure it is easy to understand by all – even non-technical users. Does it cover everything? See our SLA Checklist. Does it meet your business and service requirements? Are you satisfied with it?

Bacall Associates - Tips in using Social Media to Improve your Marketing Plan

Known for their cost-effective integrated public relations, marketing and sales campaigns, Bacall Associates sees great importance in social media because it serves as a great helping tool to a lot of business owners today. It doesn’t only help you in terms of public relations but can also boost your integrated marketing communication plan.

Remember that a goal without a plan is just a wish. Same goes with your business, it's crucial to have a plan first before you begin communicating with the world about your business. This specific plan is called an integrated marketing communication (IMC) plan. It includes different methods on how to communicate your business along with its products and services to your target audience. During implementation, it can also be an effective guideline for your marketing teams to prevent any internal arguments between stakeholders and to reduce any problems.

Similar to your marketing strategy, this plan continues to evolve and once your communication channels keep on growing, you just need to adjust your plan together with it. Your IMC can utilize several different communication mediums, including advertising, public relations, content marketing and social media. Social media, with its purpose to improve communication, is considered vital to any IMC plan nowadays.

These past few decades, social media has been proven effective to the world of marketing, making it an essential communication channel and a worthwhile source of customer information. Bacall Associates has seen the impact of social media on the following areas, which proved that it could enhance your IMC plan.

Market research                

You can use social media for your market research. Qualitative and quantitative market research are significant for an integrated marketing communications plan. You can use these sections as a guide for your strategy and tactics as well as identifying your target audience. It is often difficult to gather data on these sections, that’s why the introduction of social media has been a great help to a lot of business owners worldwide. Social media contains a plethora of social media data that can be used to discover detailed information about your target audience. You can also gather qualitative data through focus group-like questions.

Public relations

Using social media to drive public relations could also be an advantage to you. In the past, once a news break out, public relation pros are required to send emails, faxes, and make phone calls to update the reporters that their client is available to make a comment. Today, social media has lessened the stress of PR pros because it provides easy access and great convenience to them. You can achieve relevance and speed with social media, that’s why it’s now possible to get a comment out within minutes of the news breaking. It's important that your audience lives on social media and that your sources are connected to them.

Advertising

You can also advertise your brand using social media. It's evident that there's a massive change in the world of advertising today because of social media. Social media advertising has been around for a short period of time. Not surprisingly, business owners put big advertising budgets on social media because of its ability to specifically target your audience, easily measure your social media advertising ROI, and quickly make changes to your ads. Bacall Associates claims that it is now the right time to include social media in your advertising strategy and budget.

Reporting on your integrated marketing communication (IMC) plan    

Using social media analytics to report on your IMC plan is also feasible. Because of the rise of social media analytics tools, it's important that you also include the data available in these tools even if there are already many different ways where you can report on your IMC plan. Social media analytics helps you gather data from blogs and social media websites and could analyze that data to make business decisions.

Seminar on Financial Expansion by Meir Ezra

A three-day seminar under Meir Ezra promises to provide participants the capability to manage the financial health of a company, a nation or an individual.  Ezra believes that simply following the basic laws of finance will allow any person to control money and make prosperity a reality.

One thing about reading Meir Ezra’s website, one eventually becomes convinced that much of the things regarding work and success which we consider difficult or complicated appear so simple and easy to achieve. So it is with finance which is a rather challenging problem to many people who invariably encounter money issues, big or small.

This three-day seminar is intended to impart the precise techniques of handling your finances and achieving success. Learning the rules of prosperity will make each person an active producer of wealth and not a victim of need.

Ezra hopes to teach the reality about building wealth, the steps used by successful people in maintain a high level of productivity, how to achieve the ability to acquire or buy anything you want, how to manage expenses, how to enhance profit, how to ascertain that you and your organization spend within your budget, and how to earn the money you will spend for any need you have.

Here is an outline of the seminar:

·        How to remove money worries

·        How to make more money than what you have

·        How to eliminate your debts

·        How to make money easy to obtain

·        How to regain money you have lost

·        How you can fix any difficult monetary problem you have right now

Having the confidence to control finances brings so much power to a person’s life. And without that power, it would be difficult to attain a high level of security and happiness in a fast-changing world. We can be victors and not victims if we can gain the right knowledge in financial management.

Leadership is Never Based on Position

It is a common misconception that if a person is higher in rank than the others, he is already considered the leader of the pact.  Even managers have this kind of mindset.

Well, fact is, they will not be somehow on that spot if they had not shown leadership streaks, will they? After all, famous author and speaker, John Maxwell has defined leadership as having the competence to exude influence on others, thus gaining the chance to outstand over their peers. Perhaps influence means having to step up the ladder with the help of back up?

However, in his review, Prof. Mel Holcom of Arizona State University clearly states that “the first thing to realize is that taking advantage of a leadership opportunity does not necessarily mean moving up the career ladder.”

How then do we define leadership? And who are those worthy of being called a leader if it is not based on rank or position?

The Peterson Group, a leadership development and organizational consulting firm, states that you do not necessarily have to be an official to be a leader. Leadership goes more than a position or authority. The key is demonstrating relationship skills and, as Maxwell has emphasized, influence.

Setting up a good relationship among your colleagues is an important factor in being a leader, even if you are in the same level with them in a team. It is a big deal among human beings to know there is a person who understands them or someone they can go to when they need it. People can also instinctively know if you are being a fraud through your actions or being true in your intentions. The real emphasis on the C’s (charisma, character, commitment, courage and communication) amounts to the level of relationship you have built with other people, not with how many people are under you.

Influence, on the other hand, is a crucial element in leadership. Leadership can never exist without influence. Influence is not on how many influential people can back you up and get you on top of the pyramid; it is on how many people are willing to give you the position because they know you deserve it. 

On a healthy debate held for leadership development among students in Jakarta, Indonesia, reasons for being a leader without holding a position was brought to light. Among the most essential characteristics aside from the aforementioned are initiative, discernment, generosity and focus, characteristics which does not necessarily require rank or position.