It’s currently the height of tax return season, and this means two things. One, accountants everywhere are pulling their hair out, and two, those dastardly spammers are sending out their bi-annual HMRC phishing emails, attempting to fool innocent freelancers, contractor and small businesses into giving up their financial details in the belief that they’re in line for a tasty tax refund.
Although most email services such as GMail are pretty good at filtering these messages into the Spam folder where they rightly belong, some may still slip through. We’ve received six so far to the Freelance Advisor Spam folder, double what we got last year. The emails we received are as follows:
After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity, we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 973.90 GBP. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 5-7 days in order to process it.
Please download the document attached to this email to confirm your identity.
Note: You will need to provide a valid bank accoun in which the funds will be payed to.
A refund can be delayed for some reasons, for example submitting invalid records or applying after deadline.
Best Regards,
HM Revenue & Customs.
The email also had attached a crude HTML form where a potential phish-ee would enter their personal info and their credit card details. We’d hope at this point the vast majority of freelancers would be savvy enough to ignore something like this should it find its way into their inbox, but for the few who might not be:
HMRC request that all phishing emails be forwarded to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk.
Photo by Jon Feinstein – CC
