While IRS does offer to deposit refunds directly into taxpayers’ bank accounts, they have never had any facility to post refunds to credit card accounts. Anyone claiming that IRS will apply some money to your credit card is a crook who intends to levy a charge against your credit card account.

Likewise, IRS never sends out refund notices via email. NEVER.

I mention these warnings again because I just received the following email from a client.

Subject: Fw: Notice From Department of the Treasury

I just received another one of these e-mails from the IRS.

When I received the last one I guess I deleted it and could not forward it to you, so here it is.

—– Original Message —–

From: Internal Revenue Service

Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 2:33 PM

Subject: Notice From Department of the Treasury

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity
we have determined that you are eligible to receive
a tax refund under section 501(c) (3) of the
Internal Revenue Code. Tax refund value is $189.60.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days
in order to IWP the data received.
If u don’t receive your refund within 9 business
days from the original IRS mailing date shown,
you can start a refund trace online.

If you distribute funds to other organization, your records must show wether
they are exempt under section 497 (c) (15). In cases where the recipient org.
is not exempt under section 497 (c) (15), you must have evidence the funds will
be used for section 497 (c) (15) purposes.

If you distribute fund to individuals, you should keep case histories showing
the recipient’s name and address; the purpose of the award; the maner of
section; and the realtionship of the recipient to any of your officers, directors,
trustees, members, or major contributors.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here

This notification has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service,
a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.

Sincerely Yours,

John Stewart
Director, Exempt. Organization
Rulings and Agreements Letter
Internal Revenue Service

I wrote back:

Thanks for sending me a copy of that scam email. It’s the same concept, but slightly different from the one I recently discussed on my blog.

Let me know if you receive any more and definitely do not respond to any of them.

Kerry

I was curious to see what the actual scam web page looked like, so I went to it. The URL tells you it is obviously an outright scam; but the crooks have designed it to look quite a bit like an official IRS page.

For those who may not want to risk visiting this site, I snagged a picture of it:

(Click on image for full size)