HMRC Cautions Citizens Paying Taxes about Phishing E-mails

Officials from Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) are cautioning unwitting citizens paying taxes not to think they've received a Christmas gift following certain tax concession given on their names as it may just be a trick to victimize them with an advanced form of e-mail scam, published thisismoney.co.uk dated December 15, 2012.

Scammers reportedly are dispatching phishing e-mails since the deadline for self-assessment tax, fixed for January 2013, is near, to offer a luring concession.

The scam electronic mails, understandably arriving from a foreign country, have been crafted sophisticatedly as they show a URL that's a copy of the Revenue's.

Depicting tax.refund@hmrc.gov.uk as the URL, the e-mails present one big concession while ask recipients for following a given "claim-my-refund" web-link.

But doing so takes the users onto a copycat HMRC site where they're directed for providing their bank or credit card information along with passwords.

Meanwhile, people who enter the details as asked can well lose their money from personal financial A/Cs, else their private particulars to be utilized for ID-fraud.

HMRC officials caution that different from earlier more unskilled e-mail frauds, the most recent version is nicely worded using fluent English while resembles the agency's online site.

HMRC stated that if it wanted to contact taxpayers regarding a refund due to them it would do so via postal mails rather than e-mails, phone-calls or outside firms.

It further cautioned that anybody getting an e-mail posing as communication from the agency should forward it at phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk prior to erasing it for good.

HMRC will perform all that are feasible for making sure recipients of the e-mail are aware of the measures to adopt for safeguarding their information. Moreover, the agency in close cooperation with other bodies responsible for law enforcement inside and outside UK is catching the perpetrators of the current severe offense to mete out to them suitable punishment.

HMRC in addition tells citizens that in case anybody thinks he has been victimized with a scam e-mail he should inform his card issuer or bank at the earliest. Whereas incase of doubt, he should verify from the hmrc.gov.uk/security/fraud-attempts.htm URL.

Related article: HMRC - Fake Refund E-mails Tricking Tax Payers

» SPAMfighter News - 12/27/2012