IRS Refund Fraud Emails – On Their Way

In what seems to be a weekly rotation, we’re now seeing an uptick in fraudulent IRS Refund Phishing emails.

Typical subjects for this scam include:

• IRS e-file refund notification!
• IRS – Tax Refund Notification
• Tax Refund!!

While the sending addresses conform to patterns including:

• “Internal Revenue Service” <online-office@irs.ustreasury.com>
• “Internal Revenue Service” <onlineoffice@rfs.irs.us>
• “IRS, Department of the Treasury <usataxservices@irs.ustreasurydept.com>
• “IRS, Department of the Treasury” <us.service@irs.gov>
• “US Treasury” <us.services@irs.ustreasury.net>
• “Internal Revenue Service” us.service@irs.ustreasurydept.net

The text of the fraud email contains a consistent message:

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive 471.76$ tax refund under section 501(c) (22) of the Internal Revenue Code. Please submit the Tax Refund Request Form and allow us 3-9 days to process it.

Yours faithfully,
Sarah Hall Ingram, Commissioner

This notification has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.

In each case, the hyper-linked text leads to domains that are made to appear to government sites such as:

• http://www.tax.state-il.us/refunds/
• http://www.tax.state-nc.us/refunds/
• http://refunds.tax.state-fl.us/app/forms/
• http://www.tax.state-ri.us/refunds/

In each case the URLS contain longer entries with random numbers that not only will help evade simple spam filters but also makes them look more legitimate when reviewed by human recipients.

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Tags: email, fraud, IRS, phishing, scam

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Phishing Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.