Just the other day, I received a voicemail that raised my suspicions immediately. It claimed to be from the “National Tax Relief Program,” offering to help clear back taxes. Intrigued and a bit wary, I decided to dig deeper into this, and what I found was a classic scam playing out. Here’s a rundown of the call and why you should be on high alert if you receive a similar one.

Highly targeted scam calls aren’t always obviously a scam. I don’t know about you, but I associate scam calls with thick accents, broken English, and other obvious identifiers, which aren’t always present.

The number of scam calls claiming to be from either the IRS or the Social Security Administration (SSA), and claiming that they have found “suspicious activity” with your SSN, and that they are going to “suspend your social security number” seems to have skyrocketed in the past month. They come from all sorts of phone numbers (some included below), but they all seem to carry the same message.