IRS (Again) Combats Imposters

Let's say this one more time: The IRS will not send anyone an email or fax, asking for personal information. Ever. Seriously.

That's the message that the IRS is (again) trying to send with (another) public awareness campaign. Though the IRS has long battled the prevalence of bogus IRS emails, this time the agency is alerting consumers who've fallen victim to offline phishing scams, which send emails with attachments or direct faxes that claim to be from IRS to individuals or businesses, advising them to complete fake documents with personal identifiable information and fax them back to a provided number to avoid some bogus penalty.

The Fax Back Phishing Education Program, developed by IRS in partnership with the Anti-Phishing Working Group, provides telecommunications companies and fax over Internet protocol hosting firms with a fax coversheet that they can use to notify any victim of offline phishing. When individuals fax to a number that the IRS has identified to be bogus, they're faxed the coversheet in return.

This comes on the heels of another initiative by IRS to work with telecommunications to disable bogus fax numbers, and establish an audio message that would-be victims would hear when they try to fax their personal information to the number. The recorded message would inform the individuals that they were targeted by a phishing scam.

Is this really necessary? Are people really faxing their personal information to unverified individuals? Apparently so. According to APWG, the average losses of offline phishing scams ranges from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars.