The latest IRS phishing e-mails redirects victims to sites hosted in Russia, and they mimic the actual Internal Revenue Service web site almost perfectly. And to complete the illusion, as soon as you’ve entered your personal and financial information you get redirected to the actual IRS site. Fiendish! Message Labs reports that this type of spam spiked in January, hitting ten times the normal level.The IRS isn’t unaware of this problem - in fact it has a page devoted to warning about scams. They point out that “The IRS does not send unsolicited e-mail about tax account matters to individual, business, tax-exempt or other taxpayers.” If you’re wondering how your refund is doing, go directly to www.irs.gov and check the “Where’s My Refund?” page. Don’t click any links in email that claims to come from the IRS–it doesn’t!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.