“The IRS is moving immediately to notify and help protect these taxpayers, including through free identity theft protection services as well as Identity Protection PINs”, the IRS said in a statement.
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“I think many people hear “IRS” and are scared to death”, DeWine said. It’s a very serious issue because if you provide your person identifiable information to them, they could rip you off and we want to warn people about that.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration announced it has received reports of roughly 896,000 contacts since October 2013 and have “become aware of over 5,000 victims who have collectively paid over $26.5 million as a result of the scam”.
The information contained in these was then used to file fraudulent returns early and claim refunds back from the IRS on behalf of their victims. “Remember, the IRS would never call to demand that outstanding taxes be settled with a credit card payment”.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration has identified an additional 390,000 taxpayer accounts that were potentially affected by a security breach on the Internal Revenue Service’s Get Transcript online database previous year. People who receive an unexpected phone call from someone who threatens to arrest them for not paying taxes, should realize it’s probably a scam.
Don’t respond to threatening robocalls.
Make sure you trust your tax filer.
The “Get Transcript” tool was taken down last May after the IRS noticed unusual activity wherein hackers fed independently acquired authentication details to dupe the service into giving out tax information.
Offshore Tax Avoidance: The recent string of successful enforcement actions against offshore tax cheats and the financial organizations that help them shows that it’s a bad bet to hide money and income offshore.
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While the Henleys work to get to the bottom of their incident, they have a message for whoever is behind the potential scam. The IRS reported that tax-related phishing emails and malware have surged 400 percent this tax season. Victims of tax identity theft are required to complete IRS Form 14039 Identity Theft Affidavit. She also urged IL residents to report the scam to her Consumer Fraud Bureau at (800) 386-5438 (Chicago), (800) 243-0618 (Springfield), (800) 243-0607 (Carbondale) or (866) 310-8398 (Spanish), or by visiting her website.
