Cybercriminals’ Tactics

Channel Futures: What sorts of scams have cybercriminals initiated during previous tax seasons?

Webroot’s Grayson Milbourne: The types of scams are really numerous. One of the things we see are phone-based scams. The IRS is unlikely to call you, and if they call you, they’re certainly not outsourcing that call center to India or anywhere outside of the United States. [Scammers] will sometimes collect public records and then they’ll see who owes money, or sometimes they will just go after people and claim you owe money. Another more devious one is looking at people who have recently received their refund and then targeting those people. They’ll call them saying, “You actually received an erroneous refund and you need to send that money elsewhere, and we’re going to send you the proper refund.” So a lot of it’s really social engineering.

We’ve even seen things that come through snail mail, not necessarily even email. And then the last one that we see a ton of is just [text]-based. You’ll get a text message claiming to be from the IRS saying that you need to visit this website and fill out a form, and submit information. The creativity never ceases to amaze me, unfortunately.