| As the tax-return season gets under way, taxpayers beware: Scam artists are always finding new creative ideas to dupe people, and they have found another perfect way by sending bogus emails telling the recipients they are due an IRS refund. Once people follow the link, the trick becomes pretty common — they are asked to disclose personal information that can be used for identity theft or for stealing financial assets.
“The IRS does not send out unsolicited emails asking for personal information,” IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said in a press release issued last year to alert consumers about the scam, following an onslaught of complaints about emails.
IRS officials said they have identified dozens of scams in the past year, with many of them coming from overseas. The Web sites hosting these schemes come from various countries, ranging from Aruba and Canada to Korea and Slovakia. The sites contain interactive pages similar to IRS forms but ask for detailed personal and financial information.
Another scam involves the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) used by more than 6 million taxpayers to pay taxes by phone or online. The scam involves an email, usually from the non-existent “IRS Antifraud Commission,” that says the person’s credit card was used in an attempt to make a payment through the EFTPS and that the remaining balance on the card is blocked and can be released by following an online link to fill out information.
As the Internet continues to boom for everything from commerce to research, so do the online schemes. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, there were more than 37,000 new phishing sites in October 2006, compared to about 4,300 new sites created in October 2005. The APWG is “an industry association focused on eliminating the identity theft and fraud that result from the growing problem of phishing and email spoofing,” according to its Web site. While some phishing occurs by stealing information directly from a computer via malicious software, usually it’s done through spoof emails claiming to be from a bank, online retailer, or popular sites such as eBay and PayPal. |
