Just a week before Christmas, I got the much-dreaded automated call to officially inform me that I was on the naughty list. Big time. "We have been trying to reach you," the stilted voice said. This automated message, she said, should be considered my final notice from the the Internal Revenue Service.

Phone calls by fraud artists posing as Internal Revenue Service employees and demanding money have surged in recent months-enough so that the IRS named phone scams the No. 1 item on its 2015 "Dirty Dozen" list of tax scams. The smart response if you get such a call: Just hang up.

A phone call has tricked people across the country into losing millions of dollars. The message makes it appear that the victim is about to be sued by the IRS, but it's all just a scam. The Channel 4 I-Team has obtained a copy of the phone call.

The Louisville Better Business Bureau warns there is an 'epidemic" of scam telephone calls involving people representing themselves as Internal Revenue Service agents who try to trick people into giving them credit card information. "We have been getting multiple calls, nearly every day for the last two months," said Charles Mattingly, president of the bureau serving Kentucky and Southern Indiana.

People from all over the country are falling victim to a recent phone scam by scammers pretending to be IRS agents. These IRS impersonators are calling up their targets, unsuspecting taxpayers and often immigrants, and demanding that they pay taxes they don't even owe, by either loading money on a prepaid card or sending it via a wire transfer.