They’re back at it again!

A few months back I regaled you with tales of routine “robo-calls” where someone posing as a representative from the IRS left repeated threatening messages that unless I coughed up X amount of money, I would be subject to arrest for failure to pay taxes.

Having covered the accounting profession for 12 years, I did learn this much – the IRS never calls you about a tax dispute, they send a registered letter.

So therefore, I was hardly surprised when I found an email in my spam folder last week warning me of a legal IRS action against yours truly. It looked legitimate right down to the familiar IRS icon. All I needed to supply them with was my Social Security and bank routing numbers and I would be free of any further harassment.

I’m still astonished how many people freely supply these scams with personal information despite repeated warnings. Too often you read about people (usually seniors) scammed out of thousands of dollars to these online predators.

For those of you unfamiliar with this practice it’s called “phishing.” And in the past month, I’ve gotten similar emails from my bank – warning me that some information was lost and I needed to re-enter it ­- and from UPS, which informed me of a failed delivery and to receive the package they would need a credit card number.

The IRS message was too tempting to ignore so in lieu of bank information I gave them the address of the IRS headquarters in Washington and added that they would have all the information needed.

As you may have surmised, I did not get a response. I applied the same written sarcasm to UPS and ditto on the lack of a response.

Now I’m probably the last person to ask about how to sidestep these ominous threats on a technical level, there are far brighter IT minds than mine who can offer guidance. But I can tell you this, no company or individual will send a legitimate email asking for critical information like credit card or Social Security numbers. So the best course of action is to hit the delete button – period.

And to make the day complete, after the Northeast got socked by a blizzard earlier this week, I received an email from a roofing company who offered to perform a post-storm inspection. I didn’t even have to be home for them to do it; all I had to do is give them a credit card number.

My delete file is nearing capacity.