Latest phone scam: The tax man is calling

In a new phone scam, crooks claiming to be from the Minnesota Department of Revenue threaten to send the police to people’s houses if they don’t pay tax debts immediately.
The Department of Revenue issued a scam alert this week assuring people that it never calls customers demanding immediate payments or makes threats about dispatching law enforcement. It urged people never to give out personal information, such as credit card numbers, unless they are certain the call is legitimate.
“This stuff is really disturbing to us,” Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans said in an interview. “We never make cold calls. We send out a letter.”
People concerned that they may have been snared by the scam via phone or e-mail can call the Department of Revenue at (651) 296-3781 or (800) 652-9094.
Frans said the Department of Revenue encounters phone scams from time to time, and doesn’t yet know how far this one has spread.
Nationally, callers impersonating various government agencies are prevalent. Taxpayers across the country have been battered by rampant phone scams from con artists pretending to be from the IRS.
In testimony before Congress in July, a Federal Trade Commission official said the FTC gets “tens of thousands of complaints” each week about a range of different phone scams.