This Tax Season The Cyber Crooks Came Out Of The Woodwork
Whenever tax season rolls around, the crooks seem to come out of the woodwork. This tax season was no different. Internal Revenue Service scams were spread around; the most popular one involved an email that appeared to be a legitimate email from the IRS. This email stated that this year, your tax refund can be available on your Visa or Mastercard. To transfer your refund, it directed you to a website that requested your credit card number, social security number, card verification value numbers, credit card expiration dates, filing status, amount shown on your tax return, and other personal information. In today's day and age, it is my hope that nobody would give this kind of information to an unverified website merely because it looks authentic, but the few people who were duped are surely victims of identity theft and are now feeling the blowback from their fatal mistake.
When a website looks authentic and attempts to steal personal information from you, it is called phishing. A phishing example from the IRS was found on its web site, and it read very similarly to this clip: "We have calculated your financial activity for the year and have determined that you are currently eligible to receive a tax refund of $78.87. Kindly submit the tax refund request and allow us six to nine days so that we can process it. Get the form for your tax refund by clicking here." The link will take you to a phishing website.
The Internal Revenue Service wanted taxpayers to be aware that they do not notify taxpayers of refunds, or any other payments that might be due by email. Instead of going to the link in the email, the IRS urged consumers to forward the email to its agency and to delete the original email from their email accounts.
Experts tell us that IRS scams this year for the most part worked one of two ways. Crooks sent unsolicited emails that appeared to be coming from the IRS informing recipients that they had refunds coming. To receive their refund, the potential victim had click on email links and provide needed information which would be utilized to steal their identity.
The second trick that was popular was an email pretending to be from the IRS Criminal Investigation Division telling the recipient that they are under investigation for false tax returns. If potential victims wanted to find out more about the complaints against them, they had to click on links in the email which contained Trojan horse codes. These codes contaminate computer hard drives in a way that con men can remotely access their computers and use them to send spam email among other things. Next tax season, or in between, if you receive an unsolicited email from the IRS, it urges you to forward them the email.
Mallory Megan works for Rapid Recovery Solution and writes articles on commercial collection agencies Unique version for reprint here: This Tax Season The Cyber Crooks Came Out Of The Woodwork.
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