It’s a new spin on an old swindle, and already the rampant telephone tax scam has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Canadians across the country and right here in the Maritimes.

The phone conversation goes just like how many CTV News viewers have described: someone calls claiming to be from the Canada Revenue Agency, saying you owe thousands of dollars in back taxes.

Halifax police say they get about a dozen calls each day from people worried after getting the same call.

When the scammers called Robert Samson, the Halifax small business owner knew something was wrong.

“They were telling me that they tried to contact me three times, and that I owe $1,200,” Samson said.

As someone accustomed to keeping a close eye on his bottom line, he wasn’t ready to immediately send over the requested money.

“He told me that I had to pay it, so I just said to him that I wanted to make sure it was 100 per cent legit.”

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre in Ottawa says so far this year they’ve received more than 3,000 complaints, with 134 people reporting they actually paid the fraudsters.

Their reported losses this year make for a total of nearly $285,000.

In the Maritimes alone, the centre has received 171 complaints, with six victims paying nearly $10,000.

This scam or similar ones are active across the country and throughout North America, but the full extent is not know because less than five per cent of people who get these calls report them.

According to digital media expert Giles Crouch, scams like this can be quite elaborate operations, and his research has found they often begin with organized crime groups buying personal information about people from other criminal groups.

“They buy the data then they figure out what the scam is going to be,” Crouch said.

“They write the scripts and they work with their team, much like any legitimate organization would do, then the automatic dialers start dialing these thousands of numbers of Canadians,” Crouch said.

Having seen many similar operations in his 20 years in the field, Crouch says this kind of taxman scam pushes is designed to get into your head.

“They understand Canadian society, they understand our psyche and our social behaviours, so they know that pushing the buttons when the taxman calls is going to make us afraid,” Crouch said.

Canada Revenue Agency spokesperson Mayya Assouad says the demands these callers make should raise red flags with the public.

“Though the tax agency does call taxpayers when there are overdue debts or payments outstanding, they will never ask for a credit card, passport or health card number as identification,” she said.

For identification, the agency will only ask taxpayers to confirm information the CRA already has on file.

According to Canada Post, scams like this are now so common that it is now training front-line postal workers on how to detect and prevent potential victims from sending money to phony tax collectors.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Bill Dicks