Scammers Are Already Out To Take Your Rebate Check! Read This Warning!

Hey, looks like you're new here! I blog about money. Saving, investing, insuring, getting, and using it! See my "about me" page for more info! To keep up to date, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get the blog in your email! Thanks for stopping by!

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):scam.JPG

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!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Rate this:
2.5

If you liked this article consider getting MyInvestingBlog daily or sharing the content!
AddThis Feed Button RSS feed EMAIL
Bookmark and Share Del.Icio.Us / Reddit / Digg / Stumble / PFBuzz

Tags: Financial Education, Taxes //

7 Comments

  • User Gravatar no imageMrs. Micah (Who am I?)
    May 16th, 2008 at 6:08 am

    Of course…it’s perfect for people who haven’t gotten their payments yet and don’t really understand what’s going on. We got a similar, but real, letter from the IRS saying…hey, we’re putting the payment in your account via direct deposit. Just letting you know.

    But the IRS has never e-mailed me. It’d save money on paper, but in this case I prefer the comparative security.

    Rate this:
    2.5
  • User Gravatar no imageDavid Carter (Who am I?)
    May 16th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Not a bad scam. If only these people put all this work into something good instead of trying to steal people money, the world would be such a nicer place. I never trust emails I get that link to places where I have to enter personal information. If they give me a link, I make sure I type it in myself instead of clicking on it.

    David Carter’s last blog post..College is expensive, Why pay more than you have to

    Rate this:
    2.5
  • User Gravatar no imagePete (Who am I?)
    May 16th, 2008 at 7:04 am

    just got my rebate today. good post - stumbled!

    Pete’s last blog post..One last chance! $25 signup bonus with Revolution Money Exchange

    Rate this:
    2.5
  • User Gravatar no imageFFB (Who am I?)
    May 16th, 2008 at 7:31 am

    It’s amazing the scams that are out there. I’ve seen PayPal, IRS, you name it. And like yours here they all look real at first glance. Its real scary to think that people are probably getting sucked into these things!

    FFB’s last blog post..Where Is Your Focus?

    Rate this:
    2.5
  • User Gravatar no imageJason K (Who am I?)
    May 17th, 2008 at 12:14 am

    yes it just makes me sick that people are doing this. I hate scammers!

    Rate this:
    2.5

Trackbacks and Pingbacks

  1. Festive Link Love Carnivality #9 | Free From Broke
  2. Forgetting these 2 rules could cost you millions | On Financial Success

Share your thoughts, leave a comment!

If you liked this post, I'd bet that these other M.I.B. posts will also interest you: