Definitely sounds like a trap.

(What follows is a slightly unrelated anecdote.) I knew a guy who was a tax preparer back in 2009 when Obama put out the “Making Work Pay” stimulus. You basically got a tax refund of like $400 per person if you met a pretty lenient criteria.

Well, my buddy told me that during the 2009 tax season, he would constantly have people coming into his office trying to file taxes, but they hadn’t filed in a few years. After hours of getting their paperwork together and running through the tax schedules for each year, the tax payer would find out that they owed thousands of dollars in back payments. Rather than file their taxes and paying the delinquent taxes, they would just say “yeah, all I wanted was the $400” and just walk out.

I’m sure the IRS cleaned up that year if anyone who owed was bold enough to actually file.