Full Notification

It's tax season, and with tax season comes the opportunity for thieves to prey on unsuspecting victims.

Most recently, a victim made a police report for "Theft by Trickery". In this crime, the suspect, posed as an IRS agent and contacted the victim by telephone. The suspect advised the victim that money was owed to the IRS and provided a telephone number for the victim to return the call. The victim, believing that the suspect was in deed an agent for the IRS, called the number provided and was instructed to purchase and load cash cards and provide the card number and pin number to the suspect. The victim complied with the suspect, again believing that this was a legitimate agent for the IRS. It was not until later, when speaking to a friend, that the victim discovered they had been the victim of a crime.

Please review the information provided by the Internal Revenue Service on their official webpage at:

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Warns-of-Pervasive-Telephone-Scam

Here is an excerpt from the website:

"If you get a phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS, here’s what you should do:

If you know you owe taxes or you think you might owe taxes, call the IRS at 1.800.829.1040. The IRS employees at that line can help you with a payment issue – if there really is such an issue.

If you know you don’t owe taxes or have no reason to think that you owe any taxes (for example, you’ve never received a bill or the caller made some bogus threats as described above), then call and report the incident to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at 1.800.366.4484.

If you’ve been targeted by this scam, you should also contact the Federal Trade Commission and use their “FTC Complaint Assistant” at FTC.gov. Please add "IRS Telephone Scam" to the comments of your complaint."