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Few entities in the United States are as capable of commanding an individual's instant, undivided attention as the Internal Revenue Service. Possible contact initiated by the IRS has long been dangled as bait by scammers leveraging taxpayer fears about audits and other tax-related hassles. E-mail scammers posing as IRS agents have been phishing for information in inboxes since at least May 2007. The manner in which such scams are conducted range from direct collection of sensitive information (such as Social Security Numbers) to transmission of an attachment containing malware. Although a variety of IRS-based e-mail scams remained a steady nuisance, the agency explicitly stated on their web site that such communications were illegitimate: On the same page, the IRS advised: A 21 October 2013 IRS press release titled IRS Warns of Pervasive Telephone Scam addressed phone-based versions of the scams, but added an important-to-remember caveat: On 26 February 2015, the New York Times published an article titled Call From the I.R.S.? Hang Up. It’s a Fraud. The piece examined the popularity of IRS phone scams, and the lengths to which criminals went in their attempts to dupe taxpayers by invoking the specter of the tax agency: A page on IRS.gov featured a lengthy (but still probably incomplete) list of all known IRS-related scams pervasive in e-mail, on social media, and through other electronic methods of transmission. As the IRS has repeatedly noted, contact for any purpose initiated by the agency is likely to occur via mail[.]
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