The Internal Revenue Service and the Security Summit partners have warned tax professionals of an increase in phishing emails targeting payroll direct deposit and wire transfer scams.
These emails are deployed to all types of industries and employees, but the IRS has witnessed a number of being targeted to tax preparers.
Concerns from the IRS and Summit partners, which includes state revenue departments and tax community partners, are that theses scams as well as the W-2 scam are likely to increase over 2019.
Scammers tend to impersonate a company employee, typically an executive, and send emails to the payroll or human resources team. The email asks the staff member to change their direct deposit for payroll purposes. A new bank account and routing number is supplied by the scammer.
While this is typically found quickly, the victim often loses one or two payroll deposits.
Another example of the scam is where emails impersonate a company executive and are sent to the employee responsible for wire transfers. The email asks for a wire transfer to be made to a specific account which is held by the thief – victims can lose tens of thousands of dollars.
A key theme which helps to uncover a scam email is it tends to have grammatical and spelling mistakes.
One specific scam highlighted by the group is the W-2 scam. This involves an email impersonating an executive or person of authority, requesting a list of the organisation’s Forms W-2 covering all of its employees. This enables a thief to file fraudulent tax returns for refunds.
In a statement from the group it said, “All businesses should be alert to these BEC/BES scams that take many forms such as fake invoice payments, title escrow payments, wire transfers or other schemes that result in a quick payoff for the thief. Businesses should consider policy changes to guard against such losses.”
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