New E-mail Scams Offer Free Tax Assistance

US tax agency the Internal Revenue Service has said that it got reports from some taxpayers who received e-mail during the current tax season that offered tax-filing service free of cost. Walletpop.com reported this on February 8, 2011. Moreover, although there are variations in the provision of the free service, the e-mail usually tells the recipient that he must give some specific personal information and/or information about his income so it can be determined if it's possible to give him the help.

In one particular instance, a taxpayer got an e-mail from the Baltimore CASH Campaign that offered the free help. The recipient was surprised as he hadn't asked for it, is not a Baltimore resident and does not have the qualification to get the assistance.

And while the Baltimore CASH Campaign along with its free tax help is indeed genuine, it does not ask taxpayers for personal information through e-mail. Instead, the organization's online site instructs the taxpayer for calling or clicking directly to contact it for obtaining an appointment.

State the security researchers that it may be possible these electronic mails are coming from a spammer aiming at gathering e-mail ids. Therefore, anyone responding will suggest to the spammer that the formers id is valid. This way the spammer would accumulate e-mail addresses and give it to other criminals over auction.

Meanwhile, since the above kind of scams is so malicious, security specialists have suggested measures to taxpayers for maintaining distance from their fraudulent e-mails.

1stly, these e-mails frequently have misspellings along with improper language that's the most vital proof that they're bogus. 2ndly, it's important to verify the authenticity of the e-mails asking for sensitive information like in the above instance, as in case somebody is attempting at mining such information, he could be utilizing it for different purposes, including ID-theft.

Finally, any taxpayer getting an e-mail of the above kind must notify the authority about it before deleting it wholly. However, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it's extremely difficult to monitor and trace such kinds of e-mail scams since their source-of-origin are mostly places outside the US.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 2/15/2011