Tax-related scams to watch out for
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Tax Day is just over a week away. April 15 is the deadline for Americans to file their federal income tax returns unless they extend.
Tax season is a popular time for scammers to take advantage of people, according to Cliff Steinhauer, the Director of Information Security and Engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance.
He says during tax season, there’s a built-in sense of urgency and a few different pressures at play.
“In addition to the financial pressure, the time pressure, the government authority pressure, you've got personal information, your most highly sensitive data about yourself being exchanged as well. So, there's a lot of ways that bad guys are going to try to steal that information, steal money from you and take advantage of this time,” said Steinhauer.
Steinhauer says the most common type of scam they see is social engineering.
“That would be your phishing emails, text messages, phone calls, as well as malicious advertisements. So, in search results or in paid advertisements on social media, you know, bad guys can take out ads themselves and redirect people to fraudulent websites. And if you layer on AI on top of all of those historical methods of scamming people, what you have is a recipe for wide-scale, highly personalized, highly effective campaigns that are well coordinated, well organized, and are really at a much bigger scale than we've seen before,” said Steinhauer.
Some "campaigns," as Steinhauer calls them, have evolved. Becoming more targeted, refined, well-written and less generic.
“Now, with the fact that you have a lot of existing personal data on the internet through data breaches and data brokers and then leaks of information, you have a lot more that you can put into a more targeted campaign towards individuals, where that used to be a one to one type of attacker to victim scenario, where you now you have a whole database of victims and a lot of information about them, plugging that into conversational automated and automated and artificial intelligence, where these can actually, you know, send out messages, receive responses, you know, in a customized, personalized way with people, where these are actually having conversations with people with a lot of really specific information to that individual that gives them a sense that this is legitimate, this person must be from the IRS, because they know all these things about me,” said Steinhauer.
He says it's very difficult to verify the source of any kind of message, whether it's a phone call, text message or email. Steinhauer says not to trust links or phone numbers that come to you from an unsolicited message.
“Attackers will contact you through email, text messages or phone calls, and they'll be pretending to be a government official, a law enforcement official, or some other sense --or person of authority. So, they use that sense of authority to get us to comply with their requests. They're going to layer in that sense of urgency that you have to deal with this right now on this particular phone call, and they'll try not to let you hang up the phone,” said Steinhauer. “And then there's other just signs, you know if they're asking for personal information or for login information, sending links, sending phone numbers and messages they want you to call. Just don't respond to those. Always go to official sources of information, like the IRS website, irs.gov, or if it's a tax preparing service, you know, going directly to that website versus clicking on any links in advertisements or messages that you receive.”
As far as A.I., Steinhauer says it can be useful in understanding tax laws but warns that you can’t always trust the outputs.
“You should also be careful about what data you put into AI systems, because, you know, they may be using that data to train the AI model, and there have been instances where folks have been able to trick AI into giving up sensitive information about people,” said Steinhauer.
Steinhauer says you should avoid putting social security and W-2 info directly into the tool and to ask more hypothetical questions or example numbers instead of real ones.
He says doing that will layer in protections in case there’s a data exposure issue later.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel also released some tips today to protect your identity this tax season. For example, if you E-file, do it with a secure internet connection. If filing by mail, send your tax return directly from the post office.
You can learn more about scams or report one on the IRS website.