email scam Archives - Pearlman Law

28 03, 2010

Another bogus email pretends to be from IRS

By Allan|2020-02-12T14:20:18-05:00March 28th, 2010|Internet tax scam, phishing|0 Comments

Criminals who dress up as cops sometimes get a whole lot of crimes done. Similarly, internet email scamsters have been pretending to be the Internal Revenue Service for a while as well.

In this scam, a criminal sends an email which is supposed to look like it’s from the IRS. This fraudulent email asks you to click on a link to review your account, get a refund, or something, but the goal is actually to extract from your personal information, by which your identity can be stolen, or to commit some other nefarious crime which will only hurt you (like perhaps to take control of your computer and use it as a zombie bot which becomes an unwitting conduit for spam).

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9 09, 2009

New Scam Email Claiming to be From IRS is Fake

By Allan|2020-02-12T14:20:19-05:00September 9th, 2009|Identity Theft|0 Comments

The Internal Revenue Service flatly states about its own practices: “The IRS does not send taxpayers e-mails about their tax accounts.”

So, if your email in-box has a message saying that its from “Internal Revenue Service [no-reply@irs.gov]” with a subject line of “Notice of Underreported Income” you can know, from the start, that this message is a fake.

This message is apparently being sent to gazillions of email addresses.

The text of one I received today reads as follows:

Taxpayer ID: arp-0000174073547US

Tax Type: INCOME TAX

Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application)

Please review your tax statement on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website (click on link below):

review tax statement for taxpayer id: arp-0000174073547US

Internal Revenue Service

This is plainly a fake, and a scam, probably designed to steal the recipient’s identity, or install malicious software on the recipient’s computer.

Steve Ragan of The Tech Herald (thetechherald.com) reports that this bogus message is being sent out at a rate approaching 90,000 an hour, and that the goal of it is, in fact, to trick computer users to install malicious software onto their computers.

So the quick thought here: don’t fall for it, don’t click on the link in this bogus email which is designed to do harm.