I don’t often get e-mails from Her Majesties Revenue & Customs (HMRC), normally these are in a response to my filling out my tax return on-line, using the e-mail address which I have given them for confirmation. So when e-mail claiming to be from HMRC turns up in a different account I tend to be immediately suspicious, and have just received one such e-mail.

Subject: Notice of Tax Return
Date: 15 Oct 2012 07:09:24 -0500
From: HMRC taxes@hmr.co.uk
Reply-To: noreply@hmr.co.uk
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

www.hmrc.gov.uk

Date 10 october 2012
Our Ref. C/20355/12
Your Ref. 10B/235/12

NOTICE OF TAX RETURN FOR YEAR 2011

Dear Sir/Madam,/

I am sending this email to announce: After the last annual calculation
of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to
receive a tax return of:

£211.47

/To receive your return, you need to create a Government Gateway account./
/Click here to Register
/
Our head office address can be found on our web site at HM Revenue &
Customs: www.hmrc.gov.uk /

————————————————————————
…….The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential
and as applicable, copyright in these is
…….reserved to HM Revenue & Customs. Unless expressly authorised by
us, any further dissemination or
…….distribution of this email or its attachments is prohibited.

 

This one is not the most convincing phishing email I have seen (this was better but still not convincing, always look for the gov.uk domain name in the email header). As I have said before:
If you have also received one of these e-mails, first off do not click on the link and don’t give any of you details. Secondly, forward it with the full headers to HMRC (see here for details) and help them catch the scammers, it is in interest of all of us to stop this sort of thing!

I have since been told by HMRC that it “does not use email to contact people about being eligible for a repayment or to ask personal information or payment”. So any e-mail telling you that HM Revenue & Customs is offering you a tax refund it is a scam, don’t fall for it.

Oh and in case you are wondering, I have good anti-spam software and get very little spam in general, but every so often something gets through. Also the hmr.co.uk domain name belongs to a family run employment agency, who probably don’t like their domain name being used for spam e-mails either, so please don’t send them rude replies.

If you have received any such e-mails are would like to comment below, please do so. If the worse thing happens and you have given them your details – there is advice on what to do here and here.