Over the years I have written about scams against the public. These articles have included scams committed in the securities area, such as Ponzi Schemes and the like. (For more on this issue and examples of such scams, see Levine, Mark Lee and Feigin, Phil A., Real Estate Securities, PP & E, Inc. (2022), Chapter 6. In this part of the text, we discussed most of the major schemes against the public, especially those dealing with fraud against the public via real estate investments. These included such schemes as the Moneytron in 1991, Caritas in 1994, Peters Group Worldwide in 2003, and Madoff in 2008. Of course, now we will be adding, it appears, the FTX collapse and Sam Bankman-Fried, among others.)
Other scams in other fields, such as tax fraud, has been another area where the public has suffered from fraudsters. In this group of frauds, the IRS has been very active to alert the public as to various tax ploys to be concerned with from fraudulent scammers. We have addressed this area of schemes in various articles, such as the one by Levine, Mark Lee and Segev, Libbi Levine, Tax Scams Continue—and Look Who Else is a Possible Dupe—the Professional! 76, No 5 “Journal of Financial Service Professionals” 1 (August 2022). This article highlighted the position that even sophisticated tax people (counselors, CPAs[ML1] , Attorneys, et al) can also be conned by fraudsters dealing with the Federal tax area of the law. (For more on this by the IRS, see IR-2022-36.)
We have also examined this field in depth in the tax text by Levine, Mark Lee and Segev, Libbi Levine, Real Estate Transactions, Tax Planning, Chapter 40, Thomson/Reuters/West (2023).
The IRS also publishes its annual Dirty Dozen list of the worst tax scams. (See https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/dirty-dozen; IR-2023-55 re false fuel tax credit; IR-2023-54 re on line account; IR-2023-51 re email and text messages to trick people; and much more under the Dirty Dozen discussion in the Levine/Segev text, noted above.)
In another recent IR release, IR-2023-49, the IRS stressed the scams being perpetrated on the public as to false credit claims on tax returns. The IRS stressed in this Release that many promoters are “making offers too good to be true.”
The caution: Be careful out there! There seem to be scammers working on most business issues, especially those connected, this time of year, with the tax season and often tied to the web.
Mark Lee Levine