Stay Away from 24hourtaxservice.com
We recently received this e-mail from Stephanie Reese:
“I went to this site, they claimed they could do what H&R Block does and get my tax refund back to me within 24-48 hours. So I tried them. Their customer service rings to an answering machine, they can't provide the refund anticipation loan because they don't have a bank to fund it. They have since changed their website, but they will take their fees whether they have done their service or not. You see I will not get the money within 2 days, I will get the money as if I e-filed with irs.gov (a service that is offered to me for free) for the tune of $98. This is bad business. You can't reach a person, you don't get a reply on an email and the only thing that I get from the status page is lies. It claims that I have been accepted by the IRS and approved by Chase for the RAL.”
Here’s the site Stephanie was writing about: http://24hourtaxservice.com
We took a look and immediately spotted two red flags indicating this is not a credible site.
First off, there’s no identity information. If a site doesn’t tell you who owns it, or where it’s located, click away. There is a “contact us” link in the lower-right hand corner, but it’s in a very faint font designed to be overlooked. And if you do spot it, it leads to an e-mail form that only promises “resources and information on Tax return preparation and IRS tax help,” which could mean they’ll bombard you with unsolicited information, rather than answering a question.
Secondly, there’s no privacy policy, especially alarming for a tax-preparation site twill be requesting sensitive financial and personal information from users. Finally, 24hourtax service.com also isn’t a real site, per se. It’s actually a link farm, a collection of related links designed to get you to click.
We’re afraid there’s not much we can do to help Stephanie—especially since the customer service number she referred to is no longer on the site.
But we did we did look the site up on Whois, and learned it's registered to Texas International Property Associates.
Here’s their contact information: e-mail: texasipa@gmail.com phone: 214-632-7290.
Good luck, Stephanie.