This just in from irs@service.govdelivery.com:
IR-2018-253
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service and its Security Summit partners today warned tax professionals of an uptick in phishing emails targeting them that involve payroll direct deposit and wire transfer scams.
These emails generally impersonate a company employee, often an executive, and are sent to payroll or human resources personnel. The email from the “employee” asks the payroll or human resource staff to change his or her direct deposit for payroll purposes. The “employee” provides a new bank account and routing number, but it is actually controlled by the thief. This scam is usually discovered pretty quickly, but not before the victim has lost one or two payroll deposits.
A common theme in these and many other email scams is that they include grammatical and spelling mistakes.
One version the IRS and Summit partners have highligted in recent years is the W-2 scam. This involves an email impersonating an executive or person in authority, which requests a list of the organization’s Forms W-2 covering all of its employees. The purpose of this scam is to allow thieves to quickly file fraudulent tax returns for refunds.
General non-tax related BEC/BES email scams should be forwarded to Internal Crime Complaint Center (IC3) by going to www.ic3.gov.
Tax professionals and others should also report tax-related phishing emails to phishing@irs.gov.