As if filing your taxes wasn’t stressful enough, tax season also means you must watch out for scammers who are trying to trick you into giving up your personal information and your money. You may have even received a slew of recent calls, emails, or texts from people posing as government officials or tax service representatives. According to research from RoboKiller(Opens in a new window), there was a 24 percent increase in IRS and Social Security-related spam text messages between January and February of this year. These kinds of scams are unfortunately nothing new, and as PCMag senior security analyst Max Eddy writes, scammers got bolder during the COVID-19 pandemic and even started taking advantage of people receiving unemployment benefits from the U.S. government.
Who Is a Target for Tax Scams?
Anyone online can be a target of a tax scam if they don’t pay close attention to the messages they receive over the phone or via SMS. I recently discussed this particular phishing epidemic with Giulia Porter, a vice president at Teltech(Opens in a new window). The company makes an app called RoboKiller, which is designed to block spam callers from reaching their potential victims.
Porter told me that though anyone can be a target, the elderly are usually the ones caught in the phishing nets. “Some of this technology, particularly texting, is somewhat newer and a little more unknown to older people. Scammers are obviously taking advantage of that,” she said. “Scammers…
