Phishing For Trouble
In my e-mail this morning was an obvious phishing attempt that spoofed the IRS, telling me I had a tax refund that I should apply for on-line.
Given that I have never provided the IRS with that e-mail address, don’t use e-filing. and am fairly certain that the IRS hasn’t moved to Brazil recently, I went looking for a way to report it. There doesn’t appear to be one. I would assume I would need to telephone someone and they would get back to me, rather that simply forwarding the e-mail to abuse@irs.gov, like all of the real sites on the ‘Net.
In my law enforcement days, it would have been the Secret Service, but they have broken the government so badly they probably don’t have a procedure for dealing with it.
Someone has already dropped this one in the PhishTank, so volunteers will have to take up the slack until “Homeland Security” masters the mouse.
8 comments
Wasn’t there some theory around that the IRS was chartered in the Cayman Islands or something?
The Cayman Islands spend a lot of money on anti-IRS defenses.
It is still the FBI to whom you report e-mail fraud. I called the local office once when I got an *FBI recruiting * scam in my mail. That especially interested them!.
In the old days when we had a government everything concerned with the Treasury department went to the Secret Service, but they have been rolled into DHS, so I may give the FBI a call.
I hope people realize that they wouldn’t be getting an IRS letter in their email (or I hope that’s not how they arrive). I wouldn’t be following whatever link is embedded in the letter, either. I wonder how many people do? It must work, else why send them?
There are a lot of people with entirely too much trust, OWL. If there weren’t, as you say, they wouldn’t bother doing this.
I have just tried to send the latest IRS ’email’ that they owe me money (yeh, sure!), along with the full header, to abuse@irs.gov. …they have refused my email….this is their message, sender as Postmaster@irs.gov, and subject Delivery Status Notification (failed)
this is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
abuse@irs.gov
NOW who should I email?
The Federal government isn’t set up for this. You can file a report with the FBI, but it won’t do much good.
That’s why operations like PhishTank exist – to do the job the government should be doing.