Phishing E-mail Scam Targets West Virginia Taxpayers

The Treasury Department (or the Internal Revenue Service) has cautioned residents of Charleston, West Virginia (USA), to watch out for phishing e-mail scams targeting taxpayers.

The National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) states that scammers typically begin "phishing" citizens preparing to pay taxes some months before April 15. Accordingly, they send fraudulent e-mails posing as communications from the IRS.

A huge number of people fall victim to these phishing scams every year. Phishers include the Treasury Department or an IRS logo to their fake e-mails to make the latter appear a more formal government correspondence.

In several instances, cyber criminals will attack well known social-networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and gather users' personal information to make their e-mails look more legitimate, said NW3C.

Citing a recent example, Nick Newman (Computer Crimes Specialist at NW3C) described an e-mail scam surrounding the tax theme.

In the example, the e-mail told the recipient that he was entitled to a tax refund for which he needed to send the details of his bank account. The reason given was that the money could be deposited into the user's account, said Newman, as reported by Wdtv on January 28, 2010.

Newman further said that a few weeks later, when the recipient of the message tried to withdraw cash from his account, he found his check getting dishonored. On subsequent enquiry, the bank informed him that his credit balance was $13,000 less.

Hence, Newman stated that to guard one's private details from going to wrong people, users shouldn't reply to e-mails that come from strangers even if they look official, as reported by Sundaygazettemail on January 26, 2010.

Apart from Newman, other Internet security specialists remarking about the scam noted that in case the IRS required information from anyone, the agency would contact them through postal mail rather than e-mail.

However, if a user thinks that an online fraud has caught him off guard, then the victim should report the incident to the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov. This will help to bring the culprits to book.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 2/5/2010