Your friendly mortgage banker here again. This morning I sat through a required 30 minute training on how to avoid tax scams and how to help customers from being victimized by tax scams or to remedy damage if it has occurred. It is worse than ever this year due to recent hacks and breaches - especially at Equifax.
A couple of unfortunate bank customers had money deposited in their accounts from the real IRS before they filed.
Then the scammers called to "collect" the money back because of an "agency error".
We helped them call the IRS and the police and handed over all documentation on the wire fraud to the investigators.
If this happens to you, stop and call the IRS and the police immediately. Keep copies of everything forever on the matter.
File as early as possible to avoid having scammers run off with your hard-earned refund you planned to save, pay off bills with, or improve your preps, home, etc.
Person after person has posted somewhere or told me they have been called by the fake IRS scammers lately.
Do NOT return calls to these recordings or hang up if it's a live call.
The IRS does NOT call you first. They mail you the bad news first.
If you must call, look up the local IRS office's number on
www.irs.gov.
Do not give them any information or money. (ie do not feed the "bears" just like all the signs in Yellowstone Park.) They cannot arrest you for this unless you have failed to file for several years
(this excludes those whose income is too low or exempt from taxation) OR you have defrauded the government and you have been indicted. Hopefully not the case! So don't be upset by that false threat.
Do not write tax checks out to any other entity or name than the "US Treasury".The IRS does not accept checks made out to them - they return them and instruct us not to cash or post them.
If you have not registered for free credit monitoring either with a service like CreditKarma or the Equifax service, please do so. Equifax no longer forces you to accept arbitration if you sign up for their free monitoring service like their old fine print said. The feds forced them to take it back off.
You can get one free credit report from each bureau per year.
The official (and truly government endorsed) free credit report site is www.annualcreditreport.com. Any other site is out to sell you something or to collect your data (often nefariously, but not always.) The "official" site does too, but it truly is free if you keeping saying "no" to every offer for paid credit services during the process of going in and out of each bureau . I had to decline those about 10 times on my way to printing the credit report, but hang in there! It's ultimately worth it. A free credit score on your credit card statement is not enough to "keep an eye on" your credit.
The best thing is to freeze your credit. It's free with Equifax through May 31st, 2018 (then back to $3) and $3 with Transunion, and now free with Experian. Cheap insurance to pay to freeze it.
I know it doesn't seem worth it in light of the Equifax freeze, but there is starting to be justice rendered in that case since they indicted the CEO for insider trading yesterday for selling his stock before the news of this hack broke. Write your CONGRESSMAN and not just your FB friends as that will get more action than kibbitzing about how horrible they were and are.
Since the rush to freeze credit is dying down as a lot of people have done it now, please do so if you haven't already. It is easy to unfreeze
provided you have your PIN for each bureau. When you set your freeze up,
SAVE the PIN and confirmation of the freeze in a secure file so you can use it in the future. It's a painful process involving mailing hard copies of certified documents to prove your identity to get another PIN.
You can freeze your credit online and by phone. It takes only minutes, and you can do a temporary lift where you lift it for a set number of hours or a day or two (for another $3 charge for 2 of the 3 bureaus - Experian is not charging per what I was told.) I did this during Black Friday and the Saturday afterward at Thanksgiving while I was shopping smartphone deals. That way I didn't have to call or click back to freeze it again. It froze back automatically because I did not do the permanent thaw on it.
Equifax 800-349-9960 or visit them online at
freeze.equifax.comExperianhttps://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html Transunionhttps://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze/place-credit-freezeI am glad to field credit questions confidentially any time - send a message to me individually through the site.
I am not a salesperson since my job is as an analyst and trainer. So I am not on commission. This is giving back to the community in my book.
It goes along with my latest favorite quote (I have about hundred):
If you don't like your lot in life, build a "service station" on it. In other words, if you serve others, you won't be so focused on your own problems, or you might gain more perspective or blessings to lighten your own load.
