By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
Have you heard the news? You can actually get an advance payment check before you even file your income taxes. Sounds great, right?
Not so fast.
Every year around this time, many of us are busy gathering documents and crunching numbers in order to do our taxes; a yearly ritual dreaded by most.
This time of year is also when the scammers hit the pavement, looking to steal your personal information any way they can, even if it means they have to impersonate the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Recently, the IRS warned taxpayers to “beware of several current e-mail and telephone scams that use the IRS name as a lure. The IRS expects such scams to continue through the end of tax return filing season and beyond.”
According to their website, www.irs.gov, “the goal of the scams is to trick people into revealing personal and financial information, such as social security, bank account, or credit card numbers, which the scammers can use to commit identity theft.”
Here are a few of the most recent scams that have been hitting consumers:
In this scam, consumers receive a phone call from someone identifying himself as an IRS employee. The caller tells the targeted victim that he is eligible for a sizable rebate for filing his taxes early. The caller then states that he needs the target’s bank account information for the direct deposit of the rebate. If the target refuses, he is told that he cannot receive the rebate.
According to the IRS, “No legislation has yet been enacted that would allow the IRS to provide advance payments to taxpayers or that determines the details of those payments. Moreover, the IRS does not force taxpayers to use direct deposit.”