Thousands of people are conned out of money every tax season by scammers. The problem with these scams is that they sound very convincing and if you don’t know what to look for, then you could easily be taken advantage of by one of these con artists. There’s a lot of approaches that scammers use, but today we’re going to talk about The IRS-Impersonator Phone Scam.
This is probably the most common tax scam every year. What happens is that a scammer calls you claiming to be an IRS employee. They share their name and an IRS ID number both of which are fake. They also seem to already know some info about the the person that they are calling and can even make their caller ID look like it’s from the IRS. Normally they say that you owe the IRS money and ask for immediate payment. If you don’t comply they begin making serious threats, including jail time- which is pretty ironic because that’s what they’re going to get when they get caught.
Another tactic scammers use is telling you that you have a refund solely to get you to share personal information, which they can use for illegal purposes, like stealing your identity or your tax refund.
So how do you know if a phone call is really from the IRS? First off, the IRS will not call you to asking for immediate payment over the phone.
Second, they won’t call you at all unless they have first contacted you by mail. They won’t ask for your personal information won’t make threats regarding law enforcement and arrests.
If you have any other questions about tax scams, or about filing your taxes, then you can also contact us at info@groco.com
The post Don’t Get Scammed This Tax Season first appeared on Advisors to the Ultra-Affluent – Groco.
