Beware of the E-Mail
That Claims to be Coming from IRS
By M.P. Prabhakaran
Readers, beware! Beware of the e-mail that claims to be coming to you from the IRS and informs you of your eligibility for a tax refund. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service), as you all know, is the agency of the United States government responsible for tax collection and tax law enforcement. The fraudulent e-mail is another brainchild of an Internet scammer.
The IRS, to its credit, has been warning taxpayers of the existence of various e-mail scams aimed at defrauding them. A posting on its Web site on May 31, 2007, for example, “alerted taxpayers to the latest versions of an e-mail scam intended to fool people into believing they are under investigation … for submitting false tax return…. The e-mail seeks to entice people to click on a link or open an attachment to learn more information about the complaint against them. The IRS warned people that the e-mail link and attachment is a Trojan Horse that can take over the person’s computer hard drive and allow someone to have remote access to the computer.”
The IRS has also alerted the public to scams similar to the one that is the subject of this article. The posting on its Web site, on July 7, 2006, says: “The current scams claim to come from the IRS, tell recipients that they are due a federal tax refund, and direct them to a Web site that appears to be a genuine IRS site. The bogus sites contain forms or interactive Web pages similar to IRS forms or Web pages but which have been modified to request detailed personal and financial information from the e-mail recipients. In addition, e-mail addresses ending with “.edu” – involving users in the education community – currently seem to be heavily targeted.”
Phishing Expedition
Such warnings notwithstanding, scammers have been continuing their phishing expedition relentlessly. They know full well that warnings are often ignored by people until they fall victim to what they have been warned about. And how many people visit the IRS Web site to look for warnings posted on it?
The e-mail which a friend of mine recently received has “Notice From IRS” as its ‘Subject’. It says: “After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $93.60. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.”
It goes on to emphasize the need to provide accurate information and act expeditiously: “A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example[,] submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.
“To access your tax refund online, please click here [a link is provided here].”
Coincidentally, the friend who received the e-mail and forwarded it to me is Kulamarva Balakrishna, who figured prominently in my last article. As readers may recall, the article was about a Nigerian scam to which both Mr. Balakrishna and I fell victim. A crook hacked into Balakrishna’s e-mail account and, impersonating him, sent out an appeal to all the addresses in that account. The appeal read like an SOS. It said that he was stranded in Nigeria and lost his bag and all valuables. He urgently needed at least $3,500 to get out of the crisis. While most recipients of the mail saw through the scam, I got trapped into it. Maybe I was the only one who knew Mr. Balakrishna’s precarious health situation. I immediately dispatched the money, hoping and praying that it would reach him before the situation took a turn for the worse.
I think my overreaction (stupidity?) whetted the crook’s appetite. As soon as he received the money, he sent me another e-mail, thanking me “very much for the help” and asking for another $2,500. “Please i will ask you for this last help to enable me settle (sic) all other bills so that i can get home…,” the e-mail went on to say. But by then, his bluff had been called and I had begun to feel ashamed of myself.
Since then, a warning has been cropping up on my computer screen every few minutes that an attempt has been made by someone to get into my computer. Is the same crook or someone in his cabal trying to trick me into another scam? Thanks to the anti-virus program I have installed in the computer, all such attempts have been successfully blocked. But there is no blocking of the fear lurking in my mind that scammers will always come up with ingenious ways to get one step ahead of me.
Mr. Balakrishna, too, is living with similar fear. The closing of his gmail account which was hacked into by the crook did not make life easy for him. He also suspects that the same crook or.others in his gang may have been constantly at work to break into his computer. The last time we spoke, he told me that there had been 650 attempts at break-in during the preceding eight days.
Tax Refund to Non-Taxpayer
The latest scam mail, informing him of the tax refund due him from the IRS, gave him a hearty laugh, though. An Indian national living in Austria, who has never set foot on the U.S. soil and never earned a penny from the U.S., let alone file tax returns, getting a tax refund from the U.S. Treasury! He couldn’t believe it. Then he came up with an explanation, which may not be all that far-fetched. He finds a connection between this scam and the previous one which snared both him and me. Having received 3,500 American dollars sent from the U.S., Balakrishna says, the scammer might have thought that the man to rescue whom from distress the money was sent must be an American. Hence his decision to include Balakrishna among the targets of his new scam, the one aimed at American taxpayers. At least in this case, the scammer made a fool of himself, Balakrishna said.
Not necessarily, I told him. The scammer knows what he is doing. He knows full well that not all the people targeted in his new phishing expedition would be American or among American taxpayers. He is aiming at those who are. And if he can successfully fool some of those who are, his mission will have been accomplished. His ultimate goal is to get their Social Security Number, the most important ID an American taxpayer has. Once he gets that number, he can hack into most of the money transactions the taxpayer is engaged in. These days, most money transactions are done via the Internet.
The IRS has clearly stated on its Web site that it “does not send out unsolicited e-mails or ask for detailed personal and financial information.” Readers may pay special attention to this warning: “Recipients of questionable e-mails claiming to come from the IRS should not open any attachments or click on any links contained in the e-mails. Instead, they should forward the e-mails to phishing@irs.gov (follow the instructions).”
[Originally published on September 13, 2007. It has since been slightly edited.]
[Readers are invited to comment. Send your comments to letters@eastwestinquirer.com]