Protect your personal information: stay alert to scammers as tax season nears.
The Summit partners would like you to know:
• That the holiday season presents a prime opportunity for scammers to try stealing your personal information.
• What you can do to avoid them and protect sensitive personal information.
Scammers are very active during the holidays season. It is the perfect time of the year to take steps to protect your valuable information and watch out for scams. Thieves could use your personal information to file fraudulent tax returns.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO AVOID SCAMMERS
Individual
The Summit partners urges you to take extra care while shopping online or viewing emails and texts. You should consider the following while holiday shopping online:
- Shop at sites where the web address begins with “https” and look for the “padlock” icon in the browser window. The “s” is for secure communications.
- Don’t shop on unsecured public Wi-Fi in places like a mall.
- Keep security software for computers, tablets and mobile phones updated.
- Protect the devices of family members, including young children, older adults as well as less technologically savvy users.
- Make sure anti-virus software for computers has a feature to stop malware, and that there is a firewall enabled that can prevent intrusions.
- Use strong and unique passwords for online accounts.
- Use multi-factor authentication whenever possible. It helps prevent thieves from easily hacking accounts.
- Make sure that your phones and tablets are just as secure as your computers. This is because phones are used for shopping and even for doing taxes.
Businesses and those working from home
If you’re running a business or are working from home, you should consider the following:
- Use separate personal and business equipments: computers, mobile devices, and email accounts.
- Do not send sensitive business information to personal email devices.
- Do not conduct business, including online business banking, on a personal computer or device.
- Do not engage in web surfing, gaming or video downloading on business computers or devices
- Do not share USB drives or external hard drives between personal and business computers or devices
- Never connect an unknown/untrusted piece of hardware into the system or network.
- Change passwords often. Every three months is recommended. Consider using a password management application to store passwords. Passwords to devices and applications that contain business information should not be reused.
WHAT YOU SHOULDN’T DO?
The IRS and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would like to remind you of the following:
- Never buy anything from online sellers that accept payment only by gift cards, money transfers through companies like Western Union or MoneyGram or cryptocurrency. It is nearly impossible to trace and reverse payments that you make that way.
- Never respond to IRS-themed text messages. They aim at stealing your personal and financial information. There is a recent increase in IRS-themed texting scams. In 2022, the IRS identified and reported thousands of fraudulent domains tied to multiple MMS/SMS/text scams (known as smishing) targeting taxpayers.
Smishing campaigns target mobile phone users, and the scam messages often look like they’re coming from the IRS, offering lures like fake COVID relief, tax credits or help setting up an IRS online account.
Stolen data can be used to file fraudulent tax returns. Since the fraudulent returns were prepared using real financial information, it is more difficult for the IRS and the states to detect the fraud.
If you’re a business and you’ve been exposed to these IRS-related scams, you should report them to phishing@irs.gov.
The Security Summit partnership between the IRS, state tax administrators and the tax software and tax professional community have been working together since 2015 to improve defenses and protect people from tax-related identity theft. As part of that effort, the Summit partners worked on the following issues:
• To raise taxpayer and tax professional awareness about security issues; and
• To help protect the nation’s tax system from refund-related fraud.