TR Moore & Company is warning its clients of an IRS e-mail scan that has been brought to our attention this week. Read below for information on scams and what to do should you receive a suspicious e-mail that appears to be from the IRS.
Typical Scams
Most of the scams that impersonate the IRS are identity theft scams. Typically, a consumer will receive an e-mail that claims to come from the IRS or Treasury Department. The message will contain an enticing or intimidating subject line, such as “tax refund,” “inherited funds” or “IRS notice.” Usually, the message will state that the recipient needs to provide the IRS with information to obtain the refund or avoid some penalty. The message will instruct the consumer to open an attachment or click on a link in the e-mail. This may lead to an official-looking form to be filled out online or send the taxpayer to a seemingly genuine but bogus IRS Web site. The look-alike site will then contain a phony but genuine-looking online form or interactive application that requires the personal and financial information the scammer can use to commit identity theft.
Alternatively, the clicked link may secretly download malware to the consumer’s computer. Malware is malicious code that can take over the computer’s hard drive, giving the scammer remote access to the computer, or it could look for passwords and other information and send them to the scammer.
Sample Suspicious E-Mail
Remember
According to the IRS, it generally does not send unsolicited e-mails to taxpayers. Further, the IRS does not discuss tax account information with taxpayers via e-mail or use e-mail to solicit sensitive financial and personal information from taxpayers. The IRS does not request financial account security information, such as PIN numbers, from taxpayers.
How to Spot a Scam
Many e-mail scams are fairly sophisticated and hard to detect. However, there are signs to watch for, such as an e-mail that:
- Requests detailed or an unusual amount of personal and/or financial information, such as name, Social Security number, bank or credit card account numbers or security-related information, such as mother’s maiden name, either in the e-mail itself or on another site to which a link in the e-mail sends the recipient.
- Dangles bait to get the recipient to respond to the e-mail, such as mentioning a tax refund or offering to pay the recipient to participate in an IRS survey.
- Threatens a consequence for not responding to the e-mail, such as additional taxes or blocking access to the recipient’s funds.
- Gets the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agency names wrong.
- Uses incorrect grammar or odd phrasing (many of the e-mail scams originate overseas and are written by non-native English speakers).
- Uses a really long address in any link contained in the e-mail message or one that does not start with the actual IRS Web site address (http://www.irs.gov). The actual link’s address, or url, is revealed by moving the mouse over the link included in the text of the e-mail.
What to Do
Taxpayers who receive a suspicious e-mail claiming to come from the IRS should take the following steps:
- Avoid opening any attachments to the e-mail, in case they contain malicious code that will infect your computer.
- Avoid clicking on any links, for the same reason. Alternatively, the links may connect to a phony IRS Web site that appears authentic and then prompts for personal identifiers, bank or credit card account numbers or PINs.
- Visit the IRS Web site, www.irs.gov, to use the “Where’s My Refund?” interactive tool to determine if they are really getting a refund, rather than responding to the e-mail message.
- Forward the suspicious e-mail or url address to the IRS mailbox phishing@irs.gov, then delete the e-mail from their inbox.
Consumers who believe they are or may be victims of identity theft or other scams may visit the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Web site for identity theft, www.OnGuardOnline.gov, for guidance in what to do. The IRS is one of the sponsors of this site.
