Online Scams that Impersonate the IRS 

Fraudulent e-mails claiming to be from the IRS and requesting personal and financial information are often sent to taxpayers.  The subject line of one current scam e-mail is "IRS notification letter."  The e-mail message goes onto state "Important information about your tax return.  We are unable to process your tax return."  It then requests that the recipient respond by submitting personal information to the sender.  Another e-mail scam states that an EFTPS payment was rejected by the IRS.  That e-mail has a link that may download malicious software.

These are just two examples of e-mails that appear to be from the IRS but are not.  They are "phishing" scams, as the sender is fishing for personal and financial information.

Such scams may use the name and/or logo of the IRS or U.S. Department of the Treasury to mislead taxpayers into believing that the e-mail is legitimate. They may also direct taxpayers to a Web site that looks similar to the IRS Web site.  (The official IRS Web page address is http://www.irs.gov/.)

Generally, the IRS does not send unsolicited e-mails to taxpayers and it does not attempt to obtain personal and financial information from taxpayers via e-mail or tweets, nor does the IRS request financial account security information, such as PINs, from taxpayers

If you do receive such e-mail messages, do not reply to them or click on attachments as doing so could result in theft of personal or financial information.   The IRS Web site provides taxpayers with information about how to report suspicious IRS- related communications received in any format. It also includes information about what taxpayers should do if they clicked on an e-mail link and entered confidential information. http://www.irs.gov/privacy/article/0,,id=179820,00.html

From the IRS Web site: How to Spot a Scam:

Many e-mail scams are fairly sophisticated and hard to detect. However, there are signs to watch for, such as an e- mail that:

• Requests detailed or an unusual amount of personal and/or financial information, such as name, SSN, bank or credit card account numbers or security-related information, such as mother's maiden name, either in the e-mail itself or on another site to which a link in the e-mail sends the recipient.
• Dangles bait to get the recipient to respond to the e-mail, such as mentioning a tax refund or offering to pay the recipient to participate in an IRS survey.
• Threatens a consequence for not responding to the e-mail, such as additional taxes or blocking access to the recipient's funds.
• Gets the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agency names wrong.
• Uses incorrect grammar or odd phrasing (many of the e-mail scams originate overseas and are written by non-native English speakers).
• Uses a really long address in any link contained in the e-mail message or one that does not start with the actual IRS Web site address (http://www.irs.gov/). The actual link's address, or url, is revealed by moving the mouse over the link included in the text of the e-mail

If you have received an e-mail purporting to be from the IRS and are unsure about how to handle it, or if you wish to discuss this matter further, please don't hesitate to call your BST Advisor at 518-459-6700.