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Britt Erica Tunick is an award winning financial journalist who has spent the past 17 years writing about virtually every aspect of finance. She has mastered the art of boiling down complicated financial topics for readers to understand. |
You are watching TV one night and the phone rings. Your caller ID says it is the IRS and the voice on the other end says the same thing, claiming you owe back taxes. Do not believe it for one second! It is a scam. The IRS Will NEVER Call You By Britt Erica Tunick Online fraud is rampant, but it isn’t the only thing people should be on the lookout for. Just as the con artists who prey on the Internet have gotten incredibly sophisticated in their efforts to defraud people through phony e-mails and fake websites, phone scammers have gotten equally creative with their own efforts to bilk unsuspecting individuals. One particularly active phone scam in operation these days is a phony call from the Internal Revenue Service. While some of these calls are made by live individuals, a new approach fraudsters are trying is pre-recorded calls to inform you the IRS has been trying to reach you because you have under-paid your taxes. Since the format of these calls is quite similar to the pre-recorded messages frequently sent out by utility companies, municipalities and even some churches, many people wrongly assume such messages must be legitimate. But nothing could be further from the truth! The IRS says such calls have already cost individuals who have unknowingly provided their credit card numbers or financial details more than $23 million. Regardless of how official an individual who claims to be calling from the IRS or the U.S. Treasury Department may seem, or a supposed message from either government body, it is important to keep in mind that if you legitimately have under-paid your taxes neither organization will inform you of this by calling out of the blue. Nor will they call threatening to sue you if you don’t immediately provide payment over the phone. Instead, an initial notification of underpayment will come through the mail in the form of a bill. Nonetheless, there are a few important things everyone should keep in mind regarding any such contact: If someone from the REAL IRS ever did actually contact you, they would not need you to provide details about yourself, such as your social security number, as they would already have this information. Don’t be fooled if someone knows your name, and possibly even your age and address. There is a wealth of information available online these days and, in many cases, all someone needs to do to find out your name is look up your phone number online. Because a call coming into your home registers as being from the IRS on your caller ID doesn’t make it legitimate. Because of the ease of placing calls over the Internet these days, callers can easily mask the numbers they are actually calling from and enter in any name they would like to have appear on your caller ID. A large number of the people behind such scams are actually calling from other countries where such fraud is rampant, such as Albania and the Czech Republic, among others. If the person calling you has a noticeable accent, odds are good they are not legitimate and that they are calling from outside the country. If any contact you receive from someone claiming they are from the IRS makes you wonder if they are legitimate, the easiest way to find out is to ask for their badge number, hang up and then call the main IRS number at: (800) 829-1040, where you can ask to verify that any contact you may have received is legitimate. If you are certain a call or any other sort of contact you have received is fraudulent you should report any pertinent details directly to the IRS through the appropriate channel for the contact you have received, which can be determined through the following website: https://www.irs.gov/uac/Report-Phishing |
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