My friend Jay figured he was in a win-win situation: He would get $80 from the Internal Revenue Service for participating in an online customer satisfaction survey. In his mind, he would get paid for telling the IRS exactly what he thought about it.
The e-mail, which contained a web address linking to a “member satisfaction survey,” informed Jay that he had been randomly selected to participate.
He found out the hard way that he had become a victim of a “phishing” scam, which is an attempt to trick victims into revealing private, personal and financial information.
Jay said that the e-mail looked legitimate because it referred to the IRS in the “from” and “subject” lines of the e-mail. Also, the survey link and a copyright statement at the bottom of the e-mail referred to the IRS, while the survey form featured the IRS logo.
This scam targets unsuspecting taxpayers through unsolicited e-mails, and they appear to come directly from the IRS.
The scam fooled Jay — who is still checking to see what damage was done — and he is a smart guy.
While I am sure that all your clients are intelligent, it would score you big points to let them know before someone gets fiscally hurt by falling prey to an identity theft scam.
The goal of these types of e-mails, of course, is to con taxpayers into providing their bank and credit card account numbers, and Social Security numbers, thinking that they are submitting the data to a trusted site.
Additionally, it asks for a phone number, which allows the scam artist to call the consumer in an attempt to retrieve even more financial information, IRS officials said.
“The big thing to remember is that we do not send out unsolicited e-mail. Don't open the links or attachments,” IRS spokeswoman Judy Monahan said in a prepared statement.
In the past year, taxpayers have forwarded more than 30,000 phishing e-mails to the IRS, she said.
In addition to the bogus customer satisfaction survey, the IRS has reported other phishing scams, including tax refund offers and a “tax avoidance investigation” e-mail that is purportedly from the IRS' “fraud department.” In that scheme, the recipient is asked to complete an investigation form because of possible fraud that the person is reportedly accused of committing.
Meanwhile, there is apparently another scam aimed at fooling California taxpayers into believing that they are under criminal investigation.
The e-mail, which claims to be from “IRS Criminal Investigation,” falsely states that the person is under criminal investigation for submitting a false tax return to the “California Franchise Tax Board.”
These e-mails attempt to entice unsuspecting people into clicking on a link or opening an attachment to learn more about the complaint against them. The e-mail link and attachment are called “Trojan horses,” which can take over the person's computer hard drive and give someone remote access to it.
When I told Jay about this particular scam, he smiled and said: “Misery loves company.”
Read more: How to avoid Social Security scams
