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The Internal Revenue Service, state tax agencies, and the tax industry have warned tax professionals to beware of phishing scams that use numerous pandemic-related themes to steal client data.
Security Summit partners are continuing to see instances where tax professionals have been vulnerable this year to identity thieves posing to be potential clients and then con practitioners into opening email links or attachments that infect their computer systems. Once the tax professional clicks on the URL, malware secretly downloads onto their computers, giving thieves access to passwords to client accounts or remote access to the computers themselves.
Thieves then use this malware to take over the tax professional’s office computer systems, identify pending tax returns, complete them and e-file them, changing only the bank account information to steal the refund.
“Identity thieves have been relentless in exploiting the pandemic and the resulting economic pain to trick taxpayers and tax professionals to disclose sensitive information,” said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig. “Fighting back against phishing scams requires constant vigilance, and we urge tax pros to take some basic steps to help protect their clients and themselves.”
Phishing emails or SMS/texts also attempt to trick the person receiving the message into disclosing personal information such as passwords, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. Tax professionals are a common target.
Scams may differ in themes, but they generally have two traits:
They appear to come from a known or trusted source, such as a colleague, bank, credit card company, cloud storage provider, tax software provider, or even the IRS.
They tell a story, often with an urgent tone, to trick the receiver into opening a link or attachment.
Spear phishing is a specific kind of phishing email that, rather than the random nature of general phishing emails, scammers actually take the time to identify their victim and craft a more enticing phishing email. They often use spear-phishing to target tax professionals.
This year, criminals are posing as potential clients and exchanging several emails with tax professionals before following up with an attachment that they claimed was their tax information. This scam is especially popular because many tax professionals worked remotely and communicated with clients over email versus in-person or the telephone because of the COVID pandemic.
