The "Slave Reparations Act" (also called the Slavery Reparation Tax Credit, Black Tax Credit or Black Inheritance Tax Refund) is a tax fraud related to the concept of reparations for slavery.[1] The scam claims that filers can receive $5,000 or increased social security payouts for African-Americans born in the United States between 1911 and 1926.
It claims that African-Americans are entitled to a $5,000 slavery reparation tax credit. Below is a sample solicitation:
BORN PRIOR TO THE YEAR OF 1928 AND OF THE BLACK ETHNIC RACE?
DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO WAS BORN UP UNTIL 1927? DID YOU KNOW THAT THE GOVERNMENT IS REFUNDING MONIES TO ANYONE ALIVE THAT WAS BORN UP UNTIL THE YEAR OF 1927 DUE TO THE SLAVE REPARATION ACT? FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:
PROVIDE THEM WITH THE FOLLOWING INFO AND AN APPLICATION WILL BE MAILED TO YOU FOR THE ISSUANCE OF A $5000.00 CHECK WHICH CAN BE EITHER ATTACHED TO YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CHECK OR ISSUED IN ONE LUMP SUM:
NAME
ADDRESS
PHONE#
SOCIAL SECURITY
DATE OF BIRTH
The goal of the scam is to get the victim to send all of their information to the scammer. By doing this, the scammer will gain the ability to commit identity theft on the victim.
This scam may have resulted from unpassed congressional legislation in 1999 to explore slave reparations. The bill, H.R. 40, would have created a commission to study the possibility of actual reparations to slave families.
Another payout quotes $43,209 (~$641,738 in 2021) as the estimated value of "40 acres and a mule," supposedly laid out in an 1866 bill that was passed by Congress but was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. No such bill was entered into Congress in 1866. It is based on an actual order by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, Special Field Order No. 15, that set aside land from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida for the exclusive use of freed slaves. Each family would receive 40 acres (160,000m2) from this holding. Sherman may have acted on his own authority. No record exists of President Abraham Lincoln or the War Department authorizing this action.
The Freedmen's Bureau controlled over 850,000 acres (3,400km2) of confiscated land in 1865, and many of its officials intended to settle blacks on it. As President Johnson began to restore property to former Confederates, commissioner Oliver Otis Howard issued Circular 13. The document, put out in July, ordered rapid establishment of forty-acre plots in violation of presidential pardons.[2]
In response to Sherman's precedent and Howard's instructions, the White House issued Howard's Circular 15 in September 1865 ordering restoration of land to pardoned owners and taking them back from freed slaves who had received them under Special Field Order No. 15.
The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 did make public land in some states available to freed slaves. Most of this land was swampy or distant from travel routes or was claimed by lumber companies.
In April 2002, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) received more than 100,000 attempts to claim reparation tax credits and paid out more than $30 million (~$43.8million in 2021) in erroneous refunds. The IRS continued to report false tax credit scams and claims in 2003 and 2004.
An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is one of the most common types of confidence tricks. The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim to pay or simply disappears.
Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily by individuals and institutions.
Forty acres and a mule was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a wartime order proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land. However, Abraham Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse the intent of Sherman's wartime Order No. 15 and similar provisions included in the second Freedmen's Bureau bills.
Omega Trust & Trading Ltd. was an American company that engaged in prime bank fraud from 1994 to 2000. The organization was created by retired electrician Clyde Hood, who presented it as an offshore investment program offering complex financial instruments with a payout of 50-to-1 or more. In 2001 Hood pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the scheme, and admitted that Omega investors could never have received the profits that they had been promised.
The black money scam, sometimes also known as the "black dollar scam" or "wash wash scam", is a scam where con artists attempt to fraudulently obtain money from a victim by convincing them that piles of banknote-sized paper are real currency that has been stained in a heist. The victim is persuaded to pay fees and purchase chemicals to remove the dye, with the promise of a share in the proceeds.
A romance scam is a confidence trick involving feigning romantic intentions towards a victim, gaining the victim's affection, and then using that goodwill to get the victim to send money to the scammer under false pretenses or to commit fraud against the victim. Fraudulent acts may involve access to the victim's money, bank accounts, credit cards, passports, e-mail accounts, or national identification numbers; or forcing the victims to commit financial fraud on their behalf.
Voice phishing, or vishing, is the use of telephony to conduct phishing attacks.
The Slave Compensation Act 1837 was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom, signed into law on 23 December 1837.
Telemarketing fraud is fraudulent selling conducted over the telephone. The term is also used for telephone fraud not involving selling.
The redemption movement is a debt-resistance movement and fraud scheme which is primarily active in the United States and Canada. The group alleges that a secret fund is created for every citizen at birth and that a procedure exists to "redeem" or reclaim this fund to pay bills, forming a foundational section of the pseudolaw movement. Common redemption schemes include acceptance for value (A4V), Treasury Direct Accounts (TDA) and secured party creditor "kits," collections of pseudolegal tactics sold to participants despite a complete lack of any actual legal basis. Such tactics are sometimes called "money for nothing" schemes, as their aim is ultimately to extract money from the government by using secret methods. The name of the A4V scheme in particular has become synonymous with the movement as a whole.
Isaac Robert Toussie is a Brooklyn, New York real estate developer convicted of fraudulently obtaining mortgages from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On December 23, 2008, Toussie was granted a pardon by President George W. Bush; however, this pardon was revoked the following day, amid controversy over its apparent impropriety.
Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery and/or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. Reparations can take many forms, including practical assistance to the descendants of enslaved people, acknowledgements or apologies to peoples or nations negatively affected by slavery, or honouring the memories of people who were enslaved by naming things after them.
Identity theft involves obtaining somebody else's identifying information and using it for a criminal purpose. Most often that purpose is to commit financial fraud, such as by obtaining loans or credits in the name of the person whose identity has been stolen. Stolen identifying information might also be used for other reasons, such as to obtain identification cards or for purposes of employment by somebody not legally authorized to work in the United States.
Callie House (1861–1928) was a leader of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, one of the first organizations to campaign for reparations for slavery in the United States.
An IRS impersonation scam is a class of telecommunications fraud and scam which targets American taxpayers by masquerading as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collection officers. The scammers operate by placing disturbing official-sounding calls to unsuspecting citizens, threatening them with arrest and frozen assets if thousands of dollars are not paid immediately, usually via gift cards or money orders. According to the IRS, over 1,029,601 Americans have received threatening calls, and $29,100,604 has been reported lost to these call scams as of March 2016. The problem has been assigned to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, is an Act of Congress in the United States introduced in 1989 by Rep. John Conyers. The act aims to create a commission to examine the merits of introducing reparations to African-Americans for US slavery. The current iteration of the act is sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.
An SSA impersonation scam, or SSA scam, is a class of telecommunications fraud and scam which targets citizens of the United States by impersonating personnel of the Social Security Administration. SSA scams are typically initiated by pre-recorded messages, or robocalls, which are designed to panic the victim so that they follow the scammer's instructions. In 2018, over 35,000 incidences of SSA scam robocalls were reported to the Better Business Bureau, and the total losses of victims added up to over $10 million. It is believed that approximately 47% of Americans were subject to an SSA impersonation scam robocall during a three-month period in mid- to late 2020, and that 21% of seniors were targeted by at least three SSA scam robocalls in the same time period.
John Wayne Niles (1842–?) was an American politician, political organizer, an early Kansas pioneer, and civil rights activist. An African American, he founded an all-Black political party, the Indemnity Party, which advocated for reparations in the form of land grants for those formerly enslaved. Niles was one of the founding settlement leaders of Nicodemus, Kansas, a freedmen's town.
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