Scammers Are Already Out To Take Your Rebate Check! Read This Warning!
Just hours after I posted yesterdays post about Preventing Identity Theft, I got this email in my inbox this morning that looks VERY convincing, but if you used my tactics from yesterday, you’d know they’re trying to take your Tax Stimulus cash…
Here Is The Scam They’re Using
(click the screenshot image below to enlarge and see the scam):
Notice they touched it up nicely to “spoof” that it was coming from irs.gov address (notated by the #1) in the header of the email.
That will trick a lot of folks, but keep in mind, you never likely gave your email address to them when you were filling out your taxes, so how they’d have your email AND be able to link it to your Social Security number is another thing.
Beware of tactics like this!
Their misstep #2 for me came in the form of their link they sent out, notice directly after “http://” they have an IP address. This is 100% of the time a way to get you to click somewhere you don’t want to go.
They craftily followed it up with the www.irs.gov a few spaces over to the right, but that’s NOT to be trusted. You’re not going to that site! You’re going to that IP address.
I could set up a site on my blog going to myinvestingblog.com/IRS.GOV but you should know that it is not taking you to the IRS site. It’s taking you somewhere within my site.
Anything after the “http://” is where you’re heading! Don’t click IP address that follow that ever!
This actually is a pretty good spam and I’m sure it will fool a lot of people and unfortunately they’re going to get scammed for something and likely lose some money. But those of you that are frequent readers are fair-warned!
Pass this on to your friends and family to make sure they don’t get scammed out of their tax rebate too! That money has much better places to be than in their hands!
Filed Under: Taxes • financial education
