Now that employer T4s are being issued, tax time is officially under way, and with it there seems to be a rising incidence of telephone scam attempts from fraudsters purporting to represent the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA.
The warnings have been out there for months in various media outlets and via the CRA itself, as a quick Google search will reveal.
However, the problem hit home for me last week when I received two disturbing phone calls in two consecutive days. The voices were foreign-sounding in both instances and both insistent and aggressive: the gist was that unless I sent them money immediately, that the CRA would commence legal proceedings against me.
Coming as they did out of the blue, I didn’t think to take notes or string them along: the first call I hung up almost instantly, the second time I briefly tried to engage the perpetrator in a dialogue that went nowhere. “I don’t think so,” were my last words.
On January 16, 2016, the CRA’s web site revealed most of what you need to know about these phone scams. The first step is to recognize that a particular phone call, email, text message claiming to be from the CRA and requesting certain personal information is unlikely to be what the perpetrator claims.
Don’t provide personal info over phone
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