Scam targets tax professionals

The Internal Revenue Service, state tax agencies and the tax industry warned tax professionals to beware of spear phishing emails.

This is a common tactic used by cybercriminals to target practitioners, the IRS said.

This results in stolen taxpayer data and fraudulent tax returns filed in the names of individual and business clients, the IRS said.

The agency said it is seeing repeated instances of cybercriminals targeting tax professionals and obtaining sensitive client information that can be used to file fraudulent tax returns.

Spear phishing emails are a common way to target tax professionals, the Internal Revenue Service said in its statement issued earlier this month.

As a result, the IRS started a campaign.