Let’s Go Phishing
More e-mail fun:
From: “Internal Revenue Service”<service@usa.gov>
Subject: Notice From Department of the Treasury
Date sent: Mon, 5 May 2008 18:47:56 +0100
Send reply to: <donoreply@usa.com>After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund under section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Tax refund value is $189.60.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to IWP the data received. If u don’t receive your refund within 9 business days from the original IRS mailing date shown, you can start a refund trace online.
If you distribute funds to other organization, your records must show wether they are exempt under section 497 (c) (15). In cases where the recipient org. is not exempt under section 497 (c) (15), you must have evidence the funds will be used for section 497 (c) (15) purposes.
If you distribute fund to individuals, you should keep case histories showing the recipient’s name and address; the purpose of the award; the maner of section; and the realtionship of the recipient to any of your officers, directors, trustees, members, or major contributors.
To access the form for your tax refund, please click here
This notification has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.
Sincerely Yours,
John Stewart
Director, Exempt. Organization
Rulings and Agreements Letter
Internal Revenue Service
Unless the IRS has recently moved to Scandinavia and left its spell-checker behind, I sort of doubt this is real. I know that business hasn’t been great, but it’s a bit insulting to be called a “non-profit” by the “IRS”.
6 comments
“If u don’t receive your refund”
Sloppy work. Doesn’t “John Stewart” know that the possessive of “u” is “ur”?
LOL not to mention the ‘donoreply (at) usa.com’ There is a ‘t’ missing. 😉
Most of these usually come from Nigeria or thereabouts. 🙂
I would take offense at the three words ‘service usa gov’! There’s three words that are never together in reality! LOL 😉
That’s a different one from the one I saw. They wanted me to provide my bank account information so they could direct-deposit my rebate. I smelled something not particularly fresh in a certain Scandinavian state and checked the IRS website, and they were already aware of the scam, so I just sent it off to spam-land and chuckled to myself while contemplating the sad reality that there really do seem to be people sufficiently clueless to fall for these things.
My “stimulus” was, in fact, direct-deposited to my account the other day, without my needing to do anything. I’ve now spent it–partly on paying down the balance owed on my new laptop, and partly on my car insurance. Probably not what the Hedgemony would have preferred, but that’s their problem and not mine.
…there was actually a Borg-wide e-mail that went out last week warning about this and similar “IRS” phishing scams. Some were actually penetrating the virtual fence that usually blocks this sort of spam…
I got the same one Michael saw. It was short and sweet … just wanted my banking info. It looked good too, unless of course you bothered to look at the link they were sending you to.
My e-mail is set for the raw text view, and I saw that it came from a Swedish e-mail server before I got to the faulty “From” field. The web site they want you to visit to report you didn’t receive your refund is in Denmark.
Actually, I may switch all of my e-mail to a single server as it is proving to have an excellent spam system. It tags things as spam or phishing but doesn’t delete them so I can see what it’s doing. So far, no bad calls, and I can auto-delete the tagged emails with my reader [Pegasus]. I’m going to wait until after the “busy season” to make changes, because I can’t take a chance on missing anything at the moment.
This was really pathetic – not knowing what the IRS domain is, not spell checking with a US English checker, using “texting/LOL” language – the European educational system is failing the criminal class.