SUFFOLK, Va. — Staff members at Lake Prince Woods in Suffolk want to make sure their residents are protected. So, when people who live there got a letter claiming to be from the IRS they started asking questions.
“You're thinking, ‘gosh, I better respond to this, or I might be in trouble,’” says Judy Brown, a marketing professional at Lake Prince Woods.
The Better Business Bureau says impostors go to great lengths to appear real, often including real information from the IRS in their communication.
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Brown says she saw red flags right away.
“I realized that the scammers were using the logo that appeared to be almost the same with the Internal Revenue Service. They had a bar code, and they were using a telephone number and an address,” she says.
In addition to working in the marketing department at Lake Prince Woods, Brown has experience as a tax professional. When she saw the letter, she was concerned with the first sentence.
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“The first line of that letter stated, ‘thank you for inquiring about your tax return,’ and it had a specific date,” says Brown.
Brown says the person who got the letter never reached out to the IRS on the date listed.
While this letter wasn’t asking for any personal information, the Federal Trade Commission reports that impostor scams were the top fraud category in 2023.
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“There have always been scams out there, but over the past few years they've really increased,” says Judy Raymond, the executive director at Lake Prince Woods.
Raymond says her residents have seen it all: scammers have pretended to be a grandchild in trouble, and they have been targeted after the death of a spouse.
“We’ve had staff walk in, actually, and a resident on a computer getting ready to do something with money,” she recalls.
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If you were mailed a notice from the IRS, you can verify online that it actually came from the organization. I did that with the letter the residents at Lake Prince Woods received and the search came up empty.
“People should not feel embarrassed when they get these things or if they've been taken advantage of -- they need to let somebody know right away, because maybe it can get fixed,” Raymond says.
