The Internal Revenue Service has made an alert to payroll and human resources departments to pay attention because of an emerging phishing email scheme that pretends to be from company executives and requests personal information on workers.
The IRS has stated that there have been several victims to this scam, which is part of the increase in phishing emails in 2016 , as workplaces have unfortunately emailed payroll information, such as W-2 forms that that have Social Security numbers (SSN) and other sensitive data, to criminals acting as their firms executives.
If it appears that your company CEO is emailing you for a list of workers, investigate before you send out any information.
IRS Criminal Investigation is looking at a few cases where people have shared Social Security Numbers with what turned out to be criminals. They use personal information stolen and seek to make money using the information, including filing false tax returns for refunds.
This is an example of a “spoofing” email. It can contain the actual name of the company CEO. In this instance, the criminal posing as the CEO sends an email to the payroll worker and asks for a list of employees and their personal data including Social Security Numbers.
One of the companies that was a victim is Snapchat, a Social Media Company. Snapchat stated that its payroll department was hit by a phishing scam and a criminal pretended to be the company’s CEO and requested the firm’s payroll information.
The IRS said it had renewed a consumer alert in regards to e-mail schemes after seeing an uptick of about 400 percent in phishing and malware scams in 2016 and there are other reports of scams preying on other people.
These emails are supposed to fool taxpayers into believing these are legitimate communications from the IRS or other firms in the tax business. These schemes ask taxpayers about a lot of different topics. E-mails are seeking data in relation to refunds,what your filing status is, to confirm personal information, ordering tax transcripts and verifying their PIN information.
The tax industry, IRS, and state tax agencies have joined forces in public awareness with this campaign – Taxes. Security. Together. – to promote taxpayers and tax industry workers to do more protecting of personal, financial and tax data.
See Publication 4524 on IRS.gov website for more information.
Source: Accounting today – http://bit.ly/1OXVAPP
