Some brazen scammers rip off unwary taxpayers by impersonating agents of the Internal Revenue Service. They’ll call and insist that a potential victim has an unpaid tax bill and faces arrest unless they pay up, immediately. In a recent three-year period, the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration received reports of more than 1.6 million calls from IRS impersonators, with more than 8,600 victims collectively losing almost $47 million. If you have any suspicion that this isn't a scam, your tax attorney can probably help you.

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Con artists have numerous ways to make the hoax seem convincing. They can trick a caller ID to make it appear that the call is coming from an actual IRS office. They may even know part of the mark’s Social Security number.

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One massive, long-running fraud scheme, eventually busted by federal authorities, saw call centers in India use information from data brokers to find potential victims, whom they contacted and scared into making payments via reloadable gift cards or wire transfers to co-conspirators in the United States. Older Americans were among the prime targets. 

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The IRS says scammers are increasingly turning to robocalls to reach as many potential victims as possible. Their ruses have become more elaborate, with some citing a nonexistent “federal student tax” that they claim their targets have neglected to pay. But you can deter the phony tax collectors by following some basic precautions.