I just received four emails this morning, all of which notified me that my Federal tax
transaction, payment, or transfer was either rejected or canceled. In addition to the
fact that Norton flagged them as spam, the sheer number of the emails and the addresses
to which they were sent (I have multiple domains) would have been enough to raise alerts
even if I had initiated such a transaction using any one of these email addresses.
Since you may not maintain multiple domains, let's say you receive only one email and
your spam filter does not flag the message as spam. The fact that the sender's address indicates
the message is from "irs.gov" raises your concern; you really want to open the email.
Try looking at the Internet headers first. If you still want to open the email,
do not open any attachments; there are other clues that the email is bogus.
Take a look at the Internet headers and the content of one of the emails I received
(you can maximize the flash window; I'll try to work on the
clarity later, but you should be able to get the idea by
referring to your own email).
By only reviewing the first few lines of the Internet headers, you can quickly determine
that this email did
not come from the IRS. If you open the email, you can
check any link it contains by simply hovering over it with your mouse (again,
do not
click the link). The link in the email shown purports to be an Adobe Acrobat
pdf file. Hovering over the link with the mouse reveals the link as a com file that
will run on your computer as soon as you click it.
In point of fact, however, you didn't even have to go this far if you keep in mind
one simple fact: the IRS does
not send such notices by email.
Here
is what the IRS has to say on the matter.
