Footage of a US police officer toying with a scammer who had posed as a representative of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax department and threatened to arrest him has taken off on social media.
The video was posted to Facebook on Wednesday morning (NZ time), and has since been viewed close to 5 million times and shared more than 130,000 times.
At the start of the footage, Officer Kyle Roder from the Eau Claire Police Department in Wisconsin is seen calling a number that he had received a call from on his cellphone earlier in the day. When he'd received that call, he was informed he'd be arrested right away if he failed to call straight back.
But recognising the person was not actually from the IRS, Mr Roder called back and instead took to "scamming" the man who had tried to scam him - something he has the skillset to do as a trained interrogator.
The IRS scammer attempted to get him to dictate his case number, but when Mr Roder explained he wasn't given one, he then asked him to hand over his address.
"But you said you're going to issue a warrant for me and come to my house. If you don't have my address, how are you going to do that?" he asked.
Mr Roder then asked the scammer his name and IRS badge number, to which the scammer confidently responded with: "This is James Maxwell and I'm holding a badge number of ML0544501221."
His convincing spiel was undermined moments later when Mr Roder asked him to repeat his name.
"This is James Johnson," he said. When Mr Roder asked him why his name changed, he replied by saying his full name was "James Maxwell Johnson, sir".
Eau Claire Police Department used the last section of the video to warn locals to be wary of scammers, as they don't even get arrest warrants from the IRS.
Newshub.
