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The IRS Does Not Send Emails, Especially Asking For Personal Information

By Susanne Robicsek, North Carolina Bankruptcy Attorn

Your Finances and personal information need to be guared.  Beware of phishing scam that says the IRS needs information.  See this alert from the NC Attorney General, which anyone from any state can benefit from reading.  Scammers try to get your personal information any way they can, and a new way is emailing you posing as the IRS. 

Tax Time Means Phony IRS Scams

This year the tax filing deadline has been extended from the traditional April 15^th date until April 18^th. But the yearly effort by fraud artists to spread tax related scams hasn?t changed. This year some North Carolina consumers have received a ?phishing? (fake email) scam that our investigators haven?t seen before.

You get an email that claims to come from the IRS. (This should be your first clue that the email is phony, because the real IRS doesn?t contact taxpayers by email.) The email says you need to fill out the attached tax form which, you?ve probably guessed by now, asks for a lot of information that is useful to crooks. Things like your Social Security, bank account and credit card account numbers.  Tax scammers sometimes use real tax form numbers, but in this case the phony form carries a number (W-4100B2) that is completely made up.

Don?t make tax time harder than it has to be by falling for this or any of the other tax scams making the rounds via email. Instead, send them to phishing@irs.gov.  There?s additional information about these scams available from the IRS .

You can also get other tax time tips from our office, such as how to get a fast tax refund without paying any fees and how to check out tax preparers.

Report scams to the Attorney General?s Consumer Protection Division by calling 1-877-5-NO-SCAM or filing a consumer complaint online at www.ncdoj.gov.

This message brought to you on behalf of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper.

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Full post as published by Credit Law Network on February 23, 2011 (boomark / email).