#Tax Scams

[baitdragon]

Beware of Tax Scams: Essential Tips to Detect, Prevent, and Report Fraud

Understanding Tax Scams: How They Work and How to Stay Safe

With the increasing shift towards digital tax filing, scammers have found new ways to exploit taxpayers through phishing, identity theft, and fraudulent tax refund schemes. Cybercriminals take advantage of people’s trust in official tax authorities by impersonating government agencies and using deceptive tactics to steal personal and financial information. Their goal is often to gain access to victims' bank accounts, Social Security numbers, and tax-related data, which they can use for fraudulent activities like unauthorized transactions, fake tax return filings, or identity theft.

Common Tax Scam Tactics

1. Fake Tax Refund Notifications

One of the most widespread methods scammers use is sending fraudulent tax refund notifications via email, SMS, or even phone calls. Victims receive messages claiming they are eligible for a large tax refund, but to receive it, they must provide their bank account details, Social Security number, or other sensitive data. In reality, once scammers obtain this information, they either withdraw money from the victim’s account or use the data to commit identity fraud.

2. Impersonation Scams

Another common scam involves criminals posing as tax officials from the Income Tax Department or the IRS. These fraudsters contact taxpayers, claiming that they owe a significant amount in unpaid taxes. They often use intimidation tactics, such as threatening arrest, lawsuits, asset seizure, or legal action, unless the victim makes an immediate payment. These scams are particularly effective because they create a sense of urgency and fear, pushing individuals to pay money without verifying the legitimacy of the claim.

3. Fake Tax Assistance Services

Scammers also set up fake tax preparation services, offering to help individuals file their tax returns. These fraudulent services often charge high fees, submit false information, or even steal personal details from taxpayers. Victims may not realize they’ve been scammed until they face legal consequences for fraudulent tax filings they never authorized.

4. Phishing Emails & Websites

Many tax scams involve phishing emails that appear to be from legitimate tax authorities. These emails may contain fake links leading to fraudulent websites that closely resemble official government portals. When users enter their login credentials, credit card details, or other personal information, scammers capture this data and use it for identity theft or financial fraud.

Conclusion

Tax scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making it crucial for taxpayers to stay informed and vigilant. By recognizing common scam tactics, verifying official communications, and following secure tax filing practices, individuals can safeguard their financial information from cybercriminals. If you suspect fraud, act quickly, report it to authorities, and protect your identity from further misuse.

[abislwise]

I'm confused, what does Benoit Blanc have to do with it

“The WBD tactic of scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive,” the San Antonio Democrat wrote. “As the Justice Department and @FTC revise their antitrust guidelines they should review this conduct. As someone remarked, it’s like burning down a building for the insurance money."

[scamandfraud]

Tax Evasion Scams on 2024: What to Watch Out For, How to Protect Yourself, and Where to Report

Tax season is always a busy time for the Internal Revenue Service, but it’s also a prime opportunity for scammers to prey on taxpayers. Tax evasion scams are on the rise, and it’s important to be aware of the red flags so you can protect yourself from falling victim. What Are Tax Evasion Scams? Tax evasion scams are a type of fraud that involves tricking taxpayers into giving up sensitive…

[kaybelltax]

Don't be haunted by tax ghosts

Halloween may be the scariest season, but taxes can produce more year-round scares.

The CBS television show "Ghosts" is fun entertainment, but there's no joking around when it comes to ghost tax preparers and their scams, or the fraud costs caused by ghost employees and employers.

Every one of those spectral tax situations can be costly.

You can read more about other scary tax matters, as well as find tax tips and occasionally some fun tax tidbits, at my blog Don't Mess With Taxes.

[cpapartners]

IRS Warns of New Scam Involving Unclaimed Refunds

(Accounting Today) - The Internal Revenue Service is cautioning taxpayers to beware of a new scam in which fraudsters are sending out cardboard envelopes from a delivery service asking for personal info.

[prokopetz]

One of these days some enterprising con artist is going to make up a fake quirky little sci-fi movie, claim that it's been fully produced but Warner Bros. permanently shelved it for a tax writeoff, raise a couple million dollars in crowdfunding to "buy back the rights", then disappear off the face of the planet and take the money with them, and they'll 100% get away with it because really, who are we going to believe?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I'm talking about filing your taxes.

Not paying your taxes. Paying your taxes is fine. It keeps the country running, though not because the government needs our "tax dollars" to pay for things. The government annihilates the money it taxes away from us, and creates new money to pay for programs. The USA needs US citizens' dollars to build highways the same way Starbucks needs its Starbucks gift cards to make lattes – that is, not at all:

https://theglobepost.com/2019/03/28/stephanie-kelton-mmt/

I'm talking about filing your taxes. In nearly every case, a tax return contains a bunch of things the IRS already knows: how much interest your bank paid you, how much your employer paid you, how many kids you have, etc etc. Nearly everyone who pays a tax-prep place or website to file their tax return is just sending data to the IRS that the IRS already has. This is insanely wasteful.

In most other "advanced" countries (and in plenty of poorer countries, too), the tax authority fills in your tax return for you and mails it to you at tax-time. If it looks good to you, you just sign the bottom and send it back. If there are mistakes, you can correct them. You can also just drop it in the shredder and hire an accountant to do your taxes for you, if, for example, you run a small business, or are self-employed, or have other complex tax needs. A tiny minority of tax filers fall into that bucket, and they keep the tax-prep industry in other countries alive, albeit in a much smaller form than in the USA.

In the US, we have a duopoly of two gigantic tax-prep outfits: H&R Block, and Intuit, owners of Turbotax. These companies make billions from low-income, working Americans every year, charging them to format a bunch of information the IRS already has, and then sending it to the IRS on their behalf. These companies lobbied like crazy for the right to tax you when you pay your taxes.

In 2003, it looked like the IRS would start sending Americans pre-completed returns, so H&R Block and Turbotax went into lobbying overdrive, whipping up a "public private partnership" called the "Free File Alliance," that promised to do free tax prep for most Americans. But once the threat of IRS free filing was killed, they turned Free File into a sick joke. Americans who tried to use Free File were fraudulently channeled into filing products that cost money – sometimes hundreds of dollars – to use, a fact that was only revealed after the taxpayer had spent hours keying in their information. Free File sites were also used to peddle unrelated financial products to tax filers, with deceptive language that implied that buying these services was needed to file your return:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

The big winner from the Free File scam was Intuit, which bought Turbotax in 1993. They made about one billion dollars per year ripping off Americans they'd promised to file free tax returns for. After outstanding work by Propublica, lawmakers and the IRS were finally pressured to create an IRS-based free filing service that would cut Intuit out of the loop. Intuit went on a lobbying blitz without parallel, giving out $3.5m in bribes in 2022 in a bid to kill the Treasury Department's study of a free filing service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/20/turbotaxed/#counter-intuit

In 2022, nearly every US state attorney general settled their lawsuits against Intuit for the Turbotax ripoff, bringing in $141m:

https://www.agturbotaxsettlement.com/Home/portalid/0

In 2023, the FTC won a case against Intuit over the scam:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/09/nine-takeaways-initial-decision-intuit-turbotax-action

But Intut was undeterred. They came back in 2023 with a campaign to say that ripping off American tax-filers was antiracist and anyone who wanted the IRS to make filing free was, therefore, a racist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Strangely, no one bought that one. By May, 2023 the IRS had announced its own, in-house free file program:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/#tell-me-something-i-dont-know

Now, no one is forcing you to use this program. Do you have a family accountant that your grandparents started using in the Eisenhower administration? Just keep going to them. Do you like using Turbotax? Keep using it! Wanna do your own taxes? Here's the forms:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040s.pdf

But if you want to file your taxes for free, and you earn $125,000/year or less, here's the IRS's service:

https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free

Better use it quick, though. Elon Musk has just announced that he's killing it. Yeah, I know, no one elected him. That doesn't seem to matter to anyone, least of all Democrats on the Hill, who are still showing up for work every day and trying to engender a "spirit of comity" rather than screaming and throwing eggs:

https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-musk-18f-6a4dc35a92f9f29c310721af53f58b16

Musk called IRS free file a "far left" program and announced that he had "deleted it." By the way, the median Trump voter's income is about $72k, meaning more than half of Trump voters qualified for free file:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

Image: Wcamp9 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_March_28,_2024_%28cropped%29.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

[robertreich]

Trump’s Tax Scam: Why Nothing Trickled Down 

The Trump tax cuts were a YUGE scam.

But this November we have a chance to end this trickle-down hoax once and for all.

Donald Trump’s biggest legislative achievement (if you want to even call it that) was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The law permanently slashed corporate taxes and temporarily cut income tax rates mostly for rich individuals through the year 2025. The results were worse than I could have imagined.

Trump and his officials claimed the tax cuts would lead to corporations hiring more workers and would “very conservatively” lead to a $4,000 boost in household incomes.

What actually happened in the years since?

In AT&T’s case, the company saw its overall federal tax bill drop by 81%. It spent 31 times more on dividends and stock buybacks to enrich wealthy shareholders than it paid it in taxes. Meanwhile, it slashed over 40,000 jobs.

That was par for the course with Trump’s tax cuts.

Like AT&T, America’s biggest corporations didn’t use their tax savings to increase productivity or reward workers. Instead, they increased their stock buybacks and dividends.

Many of them, including AT&T, even ended up paying their executives more in some years than what they paid Uncle Sam.    

Those executives (along with other high earners) then got to keep more of their earnings because Trump’s tax cuts for individuals were heavily skewed toward the rich. The lowest earners? They got squat.

And many middle-income families saw their taxes go up.

And those supposed $4,000 raises, did you get one?

The bottom line is that Trump’s tax law fueled a massive transfer of wealth into the hands of the rich and powerful. Corporate profits have skyrocketed. U.S. billionaire wealth has more than DOUBLED since 2018.

The tax cuts have also added $2 trillion to the national debt so far, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and the so-called “party of fiscal responsibility” from doubling down on renewing them.

If Trump is reelected and Republicans take control of Congress, they’re planning to renew the expiring tax cuts for individuals that primarily benefited the rich. This would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade, more than double the cost of the original tax cuts.

Trump has also threatened to lower the corporate tax rate even further from 21% to 15% — which would cost another $1 trillion.

It’s trickle-down economics on steroids.

All of this would cause the federal deficit and debt to soar — which Republicans will then use as an excuse to cut spending on government programs the rest of us rely on.

But the Democrats have their own tax plan. We can make it a reality this November. What would it do? Just the opposite of Trump’s tax plan.

ONE: It would increase taxes on wealthy individuals with incomes in excess of $400,000 a year, while cutting taxes for lower-income Americans.

TWO: It would make billionaires pay at least 25 percent of their incomes in taxes, still leaving them with plenty left over.

THREE: It would raise the corporate income tax to 28 percent, which is about what it was in 1990.

LASTLY, it would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks to get corporations to invest more of their earnings in workers’ wages and productivity instead of windfalls for investors.

So the real choice is between the Republicans’ plan to make the rich much richer, and the Democrats’ plan to make the rich pay their fair share and provide what Americans need.

Which do you want?

[the-potus-is-a-russian-asset]

The Alpha Male / Supreme Leader of the false MAGA movement. This messiah of hate and greed is on the verge of destroying our almost 250 year old constitutional republic. Over the last two days, your 401K was needlessly gutted as a direct result of a royal decree from this “stable genius”. What was the “Dear Leader”doing while vast amounts of your retirement funds evaporated? He was out golfing with his other oligarch buddies at Mar-a-Lago, on your dime. The cost to the US taxpayers is $18M a pop everything he runs away from his responsibilities and flees down to his billionaires boys club. However, I am sure that he actually really does care about the little guy.🤡🤡🤡

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

There is no way to defend this at all, the stnadards set only allow for bibles specifically created by trump given that the bibles need to 'be bound in leather or leather like materials and contain founding government documents' which 99.9% of bibles do not have. Besides the issue of forcing bibles into schools this is a naked attempt to help Trump make money by making the state government buy his bibles in bulk which would really help him given he's facing lawsuits and a expensive presidential campaign. Trump has been and will always be a businessman first and foremost, that's we need to vote blue as he simply views being president as a means to hold onto and expand his power. Vote blue 💙💙💙 and save our American democracy from corporate and religious influences!!

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4916077-oklahoma-trump-bibles-schools-ryan-walters/

[cosmicportal]

[scamandfraud]

Tax Evasion Scams on 2024: What to Watch Out For, How to Protect Yourself, and Where to Report

Tax season is always a busy time for the Internal Revenue Service, but it’s also a prime opportunity for scammers to prey on taxpayers. Tax evasion scams are on the rise, and it’s important to be aware of the red flags so you can protect yourself from falling victim. What Are Tax Evasion Scams? Tax evasion scams are a type of fraud that involves tricking taxpayers into giving up sensitive…

[biscuitfacegrey]

Jodie Foster and/or Scam Likely? Terrible parents but they do still spark joy

like father/uncle like son ig

[siphersaysstuff]

As we head into tax time, I just want to make sure everyone knows

ANYONE CONTACTING YOU VIA PHONE ABOUT UNPAID TAXES ARE SCAMMERS

IF THERE IS A GENUINE TAX PROBLEM, THE IRS WILL CONTACT YOU VIA CERTIFIED LETTER THROUGH THE MAIL, AND ONLY VIA CERTIFIED LETTER THROUGH THE MAIL

signed, a person who's gone through Tax Issues with the IRS in the past