Tax Scammers Targeting By Demographic

Tomorrow is the deadline to file your taxes. As one spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service says, tax scammers are adapting their strategy depending on who they target. Luis Garcia says scammers either purchase or steal databases of personal information and then target people by demographic. "In communities where English is a second language, the threat is deportation," says Garcia. For the elderly, he adds, they threaten to revoke a person's driver's licence.

Garcia says scammers are relying on the people they target to panic. "They're counting on scaring you to the point where you're not thinking, and you either give up personal information which is valuable to them, or you send them money." Last year, the IRS identified over 750,000 fraudulent tax returns.