A Bogus Warning from the IRS

There's an email going around, purporting to be from the IRS, informing citizens that they have incurred a penalty because they didn't file their tax return before January 30th of this year. Couched in fairly official-sounding language, the notice threatens a fee of $10,000 if forms are filed late.

As phishing schemes go, this is a fairly lame one. Everyone knows that the IRS deadline is April 15th, and that January 30th has nothing to do with the taxpaying year. (Actually, this year the deadline is April 17th, due to weekends and holidays.) It's possible that some recipients will become confused and think that last year's return somehow didn't reach its proper destination by January 30th of this year, but that's not relevant either.

More to the point, the IRS is very clear about the fact that it does not initiate contact with taxpayers via email. It makes no difference if it's February 10th or April 15th: You will not get any legitimate email from the IRS. So if you do see something like that in your in-box, feel free to delete it. The sender is up to no good.