January 6th 2014
January is upon us again, and with it a spate of emails claiming to be from HMRC notifying 'lucky' taxpayers that they are due to receive a refund.
Thousands of people have been bombarded with such emails requesting ythat they visit the 'HMRC website' to enter their bank details in order to retrieve their refund or, in the case of the email shown below, open an attachment. Such emails can seem very authentic … but they are not from HMRC and are designed to either steal your financial and personal details, defraud you or infect your computer with malware.
The fact is, HMRC will never send notifications of a tax rebate by email, or ask you to disclose personal or payment information by email. Therefore, do not visit the website contained within the email or disclose any personal or payment information and do not forward the email, but simply delete it.
