At this time of year (March - May) many people normally expect
to hear from the tx man. This has been marked by the scammers with
a huge upsurge of spam emails entitled Tax Refund, or Tax Refund
New Message Alert!, or several other similar subject lines.
These messages are all fraudulent - HMRC do not
send out emails to tax payers. If you are entitled to a refund
they will write to you with snail mail.
Please do not open these messages, just delete them. They contain
links to dangerous web sites that may damage the data on your PC
or seduce you into giving them information about yourself that
can result in loss of funds from a bank account or risk of identity
theft. They can also put malware (malicious programs) onto your
PC which can copy information off your PC and send it to the criminals,
information such as bank account numbers, passwords and so on.
It can also result in your PC becoming a slave to the spammers
as part of a Botnet
sending out more spam (see below).
Reduced level of spam
Since August 2010 there has been a marked decrease in the amount
of spam email being sent out. The main reason for this is that
one major source in the US simply stopped sending them out. The
reason why they stopped isn't known but it was not directly because
anyone had been arrested though some arrests elsewhere might have
made them more cautious. Towards the end of 2010 this source started
up again but at a much lower level than previously. At their height
they were responsible for the sending of more than 1 billion emails
every day!
The emails were not sent from their own computers but
from those of innocent users around the world whose computers
have been taken over for the purpose. These takeovers are engineered
through the user clicking on dangerous web addresses usually
sent to them in a spam email. The perpetrators are then able to
send instructions to the individual PC telling them what emails
to send and to whom. The users of the PCs don't usually notice
what's going on and they may only find out when their PC either
becomes very slow or fails altogether. But do note that this is
not by any means the only reason why a PC runs slow!
For what it's worth I am getting 10 to 15 spam messages each day
at present (31 January 2011) of which two or three are the HMRC
fraud. This compares with almost 100 a day in earlier times, around
90% of all email sent.
