What is Phishing? Phishing is a fictitious an email, phone, text, or website pop-up that purports to be from a legitimate business. This morning I answered a client's phone to a robocall, a prerecorded message, telling me that I/we were being sued and to call (518) 375-1857. The caller ID on our phone just said "Albany, NY". The message did not say who or what business was being sued nor did the robo-call refer to a person's name or reference number that we were supposed to give once we called the 518 number. It smelled "phishing"! I reported the incident to the IRS's email as listed on irs.gov. This is their auto-response:
This is an automatic reply from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Online Fraud Detection and Prevention (OFDP) team.
We have received your report of possible phishing or fraud. Although we review and investigate each email we receive,
due to the number of incident complaints, we cannot guarantee a personal response to your message.
Please note that the IRS does not contact individuals by email.
Therefore, if you received an email claiming to be from the IRS it is a phishing attempt and should be reported to us.
Additional information on IRS phishing can be viewed here:
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Report-Phishing
Additional information on avoiding phishing scams can be viewed here:
http://www.antiphishing.org/consumer_recs.html
Additionally, please be aware of Telephone Scams. The IRS will always send taxpayers a written notification of
any tax due via the U.S. Mail. The IRS never asks for credit, debit or prepaid card information over the telephone.
https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/press/press_tigta-2015-34.htm
The IRS values your report, and encourages individuals to report future IRS phishing/fraud to phishing@irs.gov
so that we can handle these incidents and limit the number of possible victims.
To limit email volume, you will only receive one auto-response per day for any of your submissions.
Thank you for your report.
Regards,
Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
Online Fraud Detection and Prevention (OFDP)