MOUNT VERNON — Tammy Whitehall knew better than to respond to a suspicious e-mail from a sender posing as the IRS who asked for personal information.
The Internal Revenue Service recently warned tax filers to be on the lookout for e-mail and phone scams that use the IRS name as a lure.
Whitehall said she received an e-mail from a sender named tax.refunds@irs.go.com, shortly after she filed using an online tax preparation program known as TaxAct. She used the program to file her taxes over the last few years and knew what to expect — first, an e-mail saying the return has been accepted by TaxAct, and, later, an e-mail saying the IRS has received it. Instead of receiving the second e-mail, Whitehall said, she got an e-mail from a strange-sounding sender: tax.refunds@irs.go.com
“That right there threw up a red flag for me,” she said. “I knew it should be IRS.gov.”
The e-mail gave the amount of a tax refund Whitehall was eligible to receive. The amount included cents, which served to increase suspicion, as she knows the IRS doesn’t deal in cents. The e-mail asked her to submit the tax refund request and gave a link to a Web site to access the form.
“I clicked here and pulled up a site that looks exactly like the IRS Web site, and, at the top, it had different tabs to go to different areas of the Web site,” she said. “When I clicked on the tabs, it didn’t do anything.”
The page of the site asked Whitehall for her personal Social Security and bank account information.
“I just had a real bad feeling,” she said. “At that point, I called the IRS, and asked if they’d had any reports on this, and they said no, not by that name.”
She forwarded the e-mail to the IRS, and an IRS representative told Whitehall that there are several tax-related scams to beware of, including those from scammers seeking to get their hands on the advance payment checks or rebate checks, which would come from the federal government’s yet-to-be enacted economic stimulus package.
“I definitely wanted to make people aware,” she said.
The IRS expects these scams to continue through the end of tax return filing season and beyond. Identity thieves can use personal information to clean out bank accounts, make loans in the victim’s name or run up charges on a credit card. The IRS states that committing identity theft on the Internet allows scammers to act quickly and cover their tracks before victims are aware of the theft.
According to the IRS, other recent scams include the rebate phone call, in which the callers tells the targeted victim that he or she is eligible for a large rebate for filing early and adds that personal and financial information is needed to receive the rebate. A similar scam tells the tax filers they will be audited and must click on Internet links and complete forms with personal and financial data.
Detailed information on tax-related scams can be found at IRS.gov. Those who have received a suspicious e-mail may forward it to a mailbox the IRS has established to receive such e-mails, .
