The Iowa Attorney General’s Office recently announced tips to protect Iowans from tax scams during the filing season. You can find those tips here.
Brian Borcherding, Information Systems Officer at First Bank Hampton, tells RadioOnTheGo News there are some common scams to look out for after receiving your tax return.
“This is the time of year where everybody’s already received their tax return and the bad guys know it. They know you that you have money in your checking account from getting your tax return and they know that you’re extra vulnerable at this point in time. So, this is a good time to do some kind of targeted phishing email attack against you, knowing that you have extra money anyway and this is a good time to scare you into to basically handing money over I guess, into malicious hands.”
Some of those scams include callers impersonating IRS agents and email phishing scams, scammers claiming to be with the IRS and requesting personal information. Borcherding says never allow a caller you are unfamiliar with to take over your devices, like a laptop or tablet.
“Typically what the scammers do is they take control of your device. They have you log into your checking account then they transfer money out of your checking account or any of your banking accounts into their accounts. That’s one scam that they do. And clicking that link may potentially let them into your computer. Lately I have seen where you click the link, you just end up on a scary URL with a phone number to call. You definitely don’t want to call that phone number. If you’re really concerned about your computer may have been compromised, you might want to talk to some kind of IT professional to get your computer checked out to see what really happened.”
Borcherding says scammers defrauded victims out of more than $1 trillion in 2024.
