The Inland Revenue  is giving you a bonus……….

Here’s a scam you might not have experienced yet.

A couple of days ago, my phone rang. When the person asked for me, I replied, as I always do,  with  “who is calling?” The reply was the Inland Revenue Department!!!  Enough to give anyone a bad case of shock and horror.

But, wait, there’s more. The good news was that he told me I had been granted a bonus of $6,300.00 along with 500 other lucky Kiwis, because I had been such a good citizen for some years. He informed me that every so often the New Zealand government gives away these bonuses to deserving, upright citizens like me, who had paid all their bills on time, and had no criminal convictions!!!!  Yeah, right.

Now, I am the Queen of Funny Phone Calls. I deal with them in a variety of ways for a bit of a laugh on a dull day. .  Did I miss a beat? Hell no.  I just thanked him profusely and asked him what I had to do to get the money. So he said he just needed me to take down a few notes…..but I said I would do that a bit later, and enquired his phone number, name, department etc, which he gave me and I said I would call him back. And as I was still on the original call with him, I asked him what information he would need to pay me, like bank account details, and he said he didn’t need any, as they already had everything on my file!  I politely said “goodbye” then hung up.

And so, I decided to give Inland Revenue a call and let them in on this new scam, and  they were already getting calls about this.

So this is a new one, but tricky. Watch out for it.