IRS Warns of E-Mail Scam That Uses ‘Refund’ as Bait

The Internal Revenue Service may be holding a tax refund for you, but if you’re getting e-mails about it, they’re not from the IRS. It’s a scam.

Tax officials said last week that they had discovered a permutation of an identity theft scheme that the agency originally warned about in November. In this one, individuals get a brief e-mail notifying them that they’re due a $63.80 refund. The recipient is urged to click on a link to fill out a claim form. That link leads to a website that mimics the look of the IRS home page. It asks for the taxpayer’s Social Security number and says taxpayers can have the refund credited to a charge card -- as long as they provide the number and the security code.

It is one of several increasingly sophisticated “phishing” scams that have con artists posing as government officials, experts said. If the taxpayer responds, the thief has enough information to apply for credit in the taxpayer’s name.

(Another prevalent identity theft scam involves jury duty. In that one, a person is told that a warrant has been sent out for his arrest for failure to report for jury duty. If that person responds that he never received a summons, the bogus jury coordinator asks for a Social Security number and birth date ostensibly to check the records.)

“You are going to see various federal agency scams,” said Jay Foley of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “They are going to get increasingly sophisticated. The graphics, spelling and grammar are going to get much better.”

Consumers can avoid e-mail scams by not clicking on a link in an unsolicited message -- regardless of how much it looks like an e-mail from the IRS, your bank or your credit card company.