Ramsey County

Making $ense of Dollars and Cents

February 23, 2009

The IRS Is NOT E-mailing You

          This tax season promises to be extra stressful for several reasons.  Downturns in the stock market resulted in massive losses for most retirement funds, unemployment is up and bankruptcies are up. And now some taxpayers are being lead to believe that the IRS is emailing them and asking some very personal, financial questions.       

          What the IRS is doing is alerting taxpayers to be aware of e-mail scams that fraudulently use the IRS name or Logo as a lure. The IRS states, “The goal of the scam is to trick people into revealing personal and financial information, such as Social Security, bank account or credit card numbers, which the scammers can use to commit identity theft and steal your money.”

          The IRS does not send unsolicited e-mails about a person’s tax account or ask for detailed personal and financial information. Additionally, the IRS never asks people for the PIN numbers, passwords or similar secret access information for their credit card, bank or other financial accounts.

          If you receive an e-mail from someone claiming to be the IRS or directing you to a supposed IRS site, the actual IRS recommends that you:

          - Do not reply.

          - Do not open any attachments. Attachments may contain malicious code that will infect your computer.

          - Do not click on any links.

          You can help shut down these schemes and prevent others from being victimized.  If you receive a suspicious e-mail that claims to come from the IRS, you can forward that e-mail to a special IRS mailbox: hishing@irs.gov.          The e-mail must be forwarded using special instructions at IRS.gov, or it loses the encoding needed to track it to its source. The IRS can use the information, URLs and links in the suspicious e-mails you forward to trace the hosting Web site and alert authorities to help shut down the fraudulent sites.

          And finally the IRS reminds everyone that all of the web page addresses for the official IRS website begin with http://www.irs.gov.  Do not be confused or misled by internet sites that end in .com, .net, .org or other designations instead of .gov.

Go to Making $ense of Dollars and Cents Index
Go to Ramsey County Extension Service Home Page

524 4th Ave NE #5, 2nd Floor Ramsey County Courthouse
Devils Lake  ND  58301
701-662-7027
email - NDSU.Ramsey.Extension@ndsu.edu