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Today, I received an email with a subject line that said “Notice from Department of the Treasury” that stated that the IRS had calculated my fiscal activity. My, isn’t that interesting. And they mentioned something about having found out that I am eligible for a tax refund of $189.60. Nice figure. Not a lot of money but it would help a bit. Of course, I wouldn’t be buying provisions for a trip to California anytime soon. There just would not be enough money for that and for the trip too. So, my dreams have once again been devastated by a lack of money. Oh yes, I needed to submit my tax refund request in the next 6-9 days by clicking on the text that read “click here”.
Okay, anyone? This is a spam email that just happened to have an inviting amount of money attached to it so that you would go to the website, wherever it is, and put in all your information. Did I click on the link? Of course not. It was a sad attempt to get information, an act called a “phishing” expedition. At some point, all your information is then sent to whoever is looking for it, gathering info on lots of people. They can then scam you, steal your personal info or simply make your life hard by sending out viruses, worms or any other nasty programs into email that you open unknowingly.
A good example of that is an email I received today that had two nasty items in it. Since I did not open the attachment with the email, it did no bad things to my computer. That particular email was sent supposedly by United Airlines. It said that I had used my credit card to purchase a ticket and that the attached file had the information concerning that purchase. Before I ran out and purchased travel insurance, I decided to check it out a bit. It was a nasty little bugger. But wait. I had not bought a ticket to anywhere with United Airlines. Not only that but I don’t have a credit card. They blew it. Now, people who have credit cards and are worried about such unknown purchases on their cards will likely open the email. That would have released whatever thing was in the email attachment. However, you do not have to be defenseless here. But you must have an anti-virus program running for this to work.
I right clicked on the attachment. That brought up a box with choices. I chose to “save as” and put it onto my desktop for easy finding. Then I closed that and went to my desktop. I right clicked on the item which gave me the option to have the offending item on my desktop scanned. When it was finished, it notified me that there were two items inside the attachment that were hazardous to my computer. At that point, I deleted both the item on the desktop and the email that brought it to me. I am now not worried about anyone taking my credit card account and purchasing a ticket on an airline.
With a little bit of savvy, you can keep your computer free of such emails that threaten your computer. Oh and just so you know, I knew that the IRS had not sent the email. It had a few non-IRS-like phrases like “If u don’t receive your refund”. See anything wrong here?
1) The IRS never emails citizens. Everything is by snail mail. That makes it more official.
2) They do NOT use a single letter for a word. (”u”)
3) They do NOT use a contraction. (don’t)
4) How do they know they have the right person? This email did not address me by my name. All correspondence from the IRS has the person’s name, usually several times, in it. This email was to “undisclosed recipients”.
5) The IRS does not spell things wrong. “your records must show wether” and “the maner of
section; and the realtionship” (wether=whether, maner=manner, realtionship=relationship)
6) It was sent as a “noreply” which could be suspicious coming from a place like that when they actually want to hear from you.
Both of the examples are spam and have destructive capabilities to your lives or computers or both. Always check the email out if it looks even remotely suspicious. Your computer will be safe from such things as long as you do not panic, make sure it is not toxic to your computer and before you click on any email link, stop and think if this would really pertain to you. Most of these people believe you will click on the link because of fear or curiosity. Often, they are right. Too many people lose their computers or their bank account balances due to such people and the scams they pull. Don’t you be a victim.
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6 Comments
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This is a really great post, as I fear that people WILL be scammed by this. I’ve gottn these emails as well, after I knew darned well that we OWED the IRS, no refund was coming our way. Also, we never gave out our email addresses to the IRS, another way we could tell that this was a scam.
Thanks for posting this, as people need to know not to get ripped off!
Thank you. I had a feeling that some people would act on them. I got both today in emails and that was a tad unusual. It was a good thing I was watching for these things.
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I have gotten a lot of e-mails from people claiming that there are checks waiting for me and the want me to get back to them with my information. Yeah, right. If they have money for me they also have my information - address, etc. and won’t need to request it. Some of the bad English in these things are truly incredible. You’d think they would want to make their false stories as believable as possible. It is so sad that the safest way to be on the internet is to be a suspicious person. Passwords, anti-virus programs, spam blockers should not be necessities. UG, yucky puck ,and so forth is all I have to say.
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Such emails are all too persuasive to some people. Sometimes people simply do not think before they click on the link or open the attachment. Yes, some of these can sound really great, a miracle, if you will. And especially if it comes just at the right time in someone’s life.
There is a story about a woman who got an email asking for a little money ($100) to help a distant relative and in the process, receive a very large amount in return. She started sending the money. And one thing led to another, she was continuing sending hundreds of thousands of dollars because, at some point, it turned into an obsession, get the money! She could not seem to stop despite all the people who told her that it was a scam..relatives, prosecutors, officials. She couldn’t believe any of them. This scam got her for hundreds of thousands of dollars because she wanted to believe something that just was not true. These emails are like that.
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Pretty nice,Great article…Good lock!