Comments on: IRS Tax Refund Phishing Scheme

By: Sagedragon

Sagedragon — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:06:41 +0000

I’ve had three of the same scam mails. One of the links is actually an executable file that presumably unloads nasties on your machine, most likely keystroke loggers with a Trojan back end.
The Subject is: Support IRS.gov
Email return is: information@irs.security.gov
The issue supposedly is Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application) … at least they got that right.
The body includes:
To download your tax statement from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website (click on the link below):

download tax statement: commensurate-00000700955160US.pdf

Which looks for to the casual observer like an Adobe Acrobat file. But the actual link includes a “.exe” extension.

This may be more invasive than just a phishing message.

By: EFM

EFM — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:04:58 +0000

Thank you! I got that same email! But for my stimulus! Ugh! I can’t believe I really was thinking that it was real! Thanks so much!

By: FMF

FMF — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 18:21:52 +0000

Yep, they just get more and more sophisticated. I have to keep a list of legit sites that I frequent and even then, it’s still a minefield (like when you get an email from “PayPal”).

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:43:46 +0000

Thanks for this heads up. I’ve linked to the post at my new blog Financial Revolution. What I find so surprising is not how legit this message looked, but why so many of these scams look so bad (typos, poor quality images, bad grammar.) Considering how lucrative these things are supposed to be, I would think more thiefs would put in the time to do it well.