user: Input: This App Blocks IRS Scam Calls From Reaching You
An innovative way to battle fraudsters impersonating the IRS to steal millions from consumers is launching today in the form of a simple, free app.

Whitepages, a 20-year-old company based in Seattle that actually has nothing to do with phone books, is releasing an update for its app that blocks suspected IRS scammers.

Aggressive and threatening phone calls by fraudsters impersonating the IRS agents is the most common tax scam, the IRS said this year. The scammers call victims and threaten them with police arrest, deportation and other actions if they don't send or wire money immediately. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which audits and investigates our nation's tax system, said in January that it received reports of about 896,000 fraudulent contacts since October 2013, with 5,000 victims who have paid over $26.5 million as a result of scams.

The latest update to the Whitepages ID app for Android, first launched in 2008, tackles the growing scam as Americans file their taxes before the April 18 deadline.

Here's how it works: once you download the app and receive a call from a suspected IRS scammer, the app blocks the call so it doesn't ring on your phone and it will inform you with an alert that you received a call from a suspected spammer. Depending on your device, the call may go automatically to voicemail or simply drop the call.

"We hire people that do nothing else but look at these things all day long, verifying data," including telephone numbers that the IRS provides, a spokesperson for Whitepages told ABC News. "There’s quite a lot of manual work to find these offenders."

The Whitepages app developers use an algorithm to identify spam calls coming to your smartphone. For example, the algorithm can analyze if there's one phone number that's making 5,000 phone calls that each last 10 seconds. Users of the app can also submit a quick community report that warns others that a particular phone number is fraudulent or spam.

Of the 300 million incoming calls that Whitepages scans per month in the U.S., more than 15 million are classified as “unwanted,” the company said. While phone users can block individual calls on their phone, the app tries to assist in preventing the deluge from scammers changing their phone numbers as much as 60 times a year, Whitepages said.

While the Federal Communications Commission has encouraged carriers to create a systematic way to block spammers and fraudsters from calling you, the Whitpages app is working with carriers like T-Mobile and companies like Samsung to boost their efforts.

In addition to blocking numbers suspected as IRS scammers, the app allows users to block categories of callers, such as unidentified numbers or international calls.
What was this article about?
++++++++++
It's about: An innovative way to battle fraudsters impersonating the IRS to steal millions from consumers is launching today in the form of a simple, free app.


Problem: Forest elephants are vanishing, and they might never recover from poaching

It’s easy to kill an elephant, as hunters and ivory poachers have shown for quite some time. Creating one, however, is an entirely different story.

Among the forest elephants in Central Africa, females don’t typically breed until they’re 23 years old — “a markedly late age of maturity relative to other mammals,” notes Andrea Turkalo, a scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Two years elapse from conception to birth. And a new calf comes along just once every five or six years.

Given their low birthrate and poachers’ massive killing of herds from 2002 to 2011, a new study’s description of that decade as “a lost century” doesn’t seem much like hyperbole. Commissioned by the conservation organization, the study concludes that it will take forest elephants 90 years for their numbers to recover.

[The largest-ever survey of elephants in Africa reveals startling declines]

That’s a daunting projection, but the study doesn’t go so far as to say forest elephants are threatened with extinction. Loxodonta cyclotis lives in scattered groups; some populations are doing marginally well, others not so much. “I would not feel confident in saying the species will be extinct based on what we know currently,” said George Wittemyer, a professor of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University, who wrote the study with Turkalo. “Rather, it looks like we are at risk of losing important populations within the next decade if things do not change.”

The purpose of the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Applied Ecology, was “to fill in the massive lack of understanding of the basic biology of forest elephants,” Wittemyer said. They are among the largest animals to walk the Earth, but their numbers and biology are still largely unknown to science. The researchers analyzed 80 surveys carried out between 2002 and 2011 throughout the Central African forest block in Gabon, Cameroon, Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The work was funded by a long list of conservation groups, including the Jane Goodall Institute, and federal agencies, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The analysis yielded several disturbing findings. In the study years, the known populations of forest elephants declined by 62 percent. As a result, the giants are disappearing from their range. The remaining populations are only 10 percent of what their habitat could support because of killings by poachers hoping to cash in on China’s ivory black market. Development also is expanding into these areas and people occasionally kill forest elephants for meat.

The huge losses not only threaten forest elephants’ long-term survival but the health of the forest. Forest elephants are prolific fruit eaters, and their snacking spreads seeds far and wide. Their migration tramples the ground and opens paths, allowing seeds to take root and grow the forest. Failing to protect the elephants is akin to failing to protect forests that are crucial to absorbing carbon gases in a warming world, the researchers say.

[Poison ivory: Why a legal ivory market isn’t a solution to poaching]

A second purpose of the study was thinly veiled: activism. The Wildlife Conservation Society and the other funding groups are out to save elephants in both the forest and savanna, and the study is a message to international policymakers to get even tougher on the now-banned ivory trade. It’s also a message to the Chinese government to do more to reverse that country’s cultural yearning for ivory.

Wittemyer said historical data on forest elephants isn’t very accurate, but the survey analysis showed that their mortality has accelerated because of the ivory trade.

“This paper is really targeting policy around the ivory trade and awareness around the impact of the ivory trade on the species in the hopes that actions can reduce the economic incentives for poaching,” Wittemyer said. “We hope this paper will influence consuming nations … to change their behavior and to set in place policies that discourage ivory consumption.”

Antique dealers say ivory ban will cost billions

A ton of ivory is worth millions. The government just destroyed it

The motive for killers — in one revealing chart

Write a one or two sentence summary.

Summary: Forest elephant populations have declined by more than 60 percent.


Q: Mitochondrial Disease Research Makes Progress

Scientists have made significant advances in the quest to treat mitochondrial disease, an incurable genetic malady that afflicts thousands of U.S. children each year.

In experiments reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers used two cutting-edge laboratory techniques—cloning and cell reprogramming—to make fresh tissue that was a perfect genetic match for patients suffering from the disorder.

A:

assistant: Using cloning and cell reprogramming to create fresh tissue, scientists have made significant advances in the quest to treat mitochondrial disease, an incurable genetic malady that afflicts thousands of U.S. children each year.