CONSUMER AFFAIRS OFFICE
Township of Livingston
DIRECTOR: WALTER D. LeVINE
Director’s Office: (973) 377-3313
January 7, 2008
As the Director of our Consumer Affairs Office, and as we approach
tax season I wish to advise our residents and businesses of several
scams and attempts to obtain information used eventually for
identity theft, as reported by IRS.
The first is a seemingly, happy to be received, e-mail that
appears to be sent by IRS, informing the recipient that they
are entitled to a small refund. The e-mail continues by stating
that a refund form can be accessed and processed on-line.
Other forms of identity theft scams reported involve seemingly
legitimate solicitations from IRS and/or the US Government seeking
contributions for the California wildfire relief, promises of
fees for completing an IRS customer satisfaction survey, and,
although limited so far, an e-mail purporting to inform the recipient
they are under criminal investigation for submitting a false
State tax return.
ALL of these solicitations are not legitimate and should be
reported to the proper authorities. IRS maintains a web site
specifically to report these solicitations, and they ask that
you forward the entire e-mail you received to: phishing@irs.gov.
IRS also has, at its web site (accessed by typing www.irs.gov in
your browser) several articles and announcements regarding these
scams, how to protect yourself, and how to report them. The Service
also indicates that its legitimate web page addresses begin with http://www.irs.gov/ so
if you do not this in your browser, even if the site you are
on looks official, do not provide any personal, banking, credit
card or other business information.
DO NOT RESPOND to them and check the official
IRS web site if you have any questions.
I am also reminding our residents of the jury duty scam, which
is still going around. Someone calls, stating they are a representative
of the Courts, indicating that an arrest warrant has been issued
for failure to reply to a jury summons, or failure to appear
on the scheduled date. If you protest that you never received
a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social
Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the
information and cancel the arrest warrant. Sometimes they even
ask for credit card numbers, stating there is a fee to negate
the warrant. Give out any of this information and bingo,
your identity just got stolen.
Several NJ Courts have issued warnings about this. If you get
one of these calls, before you give any information, call the
Court itself and verify the accuracy of the claim.
Articles on these and other popular scams are on our web site: http://www.livingstonnj.org/consumeraffairs
If you doubt the legitimacy of the solicitation,
call me with your questions or to report new scams. I will keep
the community informed.
