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Email Notifying ‘Tax Refund’ is Fake According to Barrie Police

Barrie.ctvnews.ca reported on 27th March, 2014 quoting Police as announcing "A scam email is going around Barrie, Central Ontario, Canada claiming that the recipient is getting tax refund from Canada Revenue Agency."

Notably, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is the Canadian counterpart of U.S. IRS and is responsible to administer the taxation process on behalf of the Canadian Government.

The fraudulent email tells the recipient that after the final annual calculation of his fiscal activity, CRA has determined that he is eligible to get a tax refund amounting to $521.51. Consequently, he is directed to complete the refund form and then mail it to one of the addresses that are furnished on the second page of the form.

He is told that he will find the English and the French version of the form.

The email gives a refund reference number to make the email look more authentic.

The email asks the users to click on an attached link to get the form for filling to get tax refund.

The email also tells the recipients to delete the form from their computer after taking the print out due to security reasons.

Officials of CRA when contact by Police said that they never send emails asking people to provide any type of information.

People should always be careful about unsolicited emails claiming to be from the Tax Office. The agency (CRA), as an extra precaution, recommends you to type Internet addresses directly into your Internet browser instead of clicking on links embedded in emails.

Experts analyzing the scam email comment: Such tax refund phishing attacks have become a common incident in recent years during tax season which proves that they have major success rates.

Unfortunately, tax offices in many countries have been targeted in the past. Like CRA, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Australia's official tax collecting agency, also issued a warning about scam emails offering refunds to recipients or alerting them of fake problems with their tax refunds during early February 2014. Similarly taxpayers should be wary of e-mails offering tax rebates purporting to be from HMRC, the official tax collecting agency of UK, after a 47% surge in such phishing scams.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/2/2014

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