In my spam filter this morning were three emails from “service@irs-usa.com” with the subject “Notice From the Department of Treasury.”  They were all viruses. 

Please note first that all emails from the federal government will almost always use .gov and not .com as the top-level domain name.  In addition, the Internal Revenue Service will NEVER contact a taxpayer via email. 

Never, ever, ever, respond to an email from the government, a bank, a credit union, or anyone else that asks you to provide sensitive or personal information, such as social security numbers or bank account numbers. Don’t click on any site embedded in these emails, either.  They often seem legitimate, but are not.

For more information on protecting yourself from identity theft, click here.

Let’s be careful out there.

Tags: Department of Treasury, indentity theft, Internal Revenue Service, IRS, phishing, scams, Treasury Department, viruses

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:18 am and is filed under Consumer Law, Identity Theft, business law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.