Ilyce Glink's Blog

Welcome to Ilyce Glink's blog! Here you'll find Ilyce's latest insights on personal finance advice, real estate advice and consumer issues. Come back often for timely and interesting posts on a wide variety of topics.

UPS Warns of Virus E-mail

The United Parcel Service, or UPS, warns that there's a fraudulent e-mail being sent out that tells customers a package could not be delivered. The e-mail has an attachment that's a virus.

UPS states they rarely send out e-mails with attachments and that if you receive such an email you should delete it and not open the attachment.

If you have a question about whether to trust the e-mail, contact customerservice@ups.com.

Labels: consumers, e-mail, e-mail virus, UPS

posted by Melanie G. Rogers at 12:55 PM 0 comments

Got an E-mail from the IRS? It's Probably Fake

Apparently scammers are at it again. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service announced yesterday that scammers posing as the IRS are sending fraudulent e-mails to people.

The IRS reminds us that they generally don't contact taxpayers using e-mail.

In May and June people reported more than 700 phishing scams to the IRS. The total for 2008 is 1,600. Thieves ask for your personal information like bank account numbers in a phishing e-mail. Once they have it, they use it to steal your financial identity.

Want to learn more about Phishing? Check out Ilyce's Phishing video:


"Taxpayers should take steps to keep their personal information out of the hands of identity thieves," said IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. "That includes not falling for any of the phony e-mails or faxes now in circulation pretending to come from the IRS."

The two most common scams currently are a tax refund scam and an economic stimulus scam. In the tax refund scam you get an e-mail saying to respond so that you can get your tax refund. The only way to get a tax refund is to file a tax return, according to the IRS.

In the economic stimulus scam, the e-mail says you're eligible for a stimulus payment and to click here to fill out a form. Again you can only get your stimulus payment after filing a tax return.

If you have tax questions visit http://www.irs.gov/ - don't click any links out of e-mails. And if an e-mail sounds too good to be true it probably is.

Labels: e-mail, IRS, Phishing, Scams

posted by Melanie G. Rogers at 2:38 PM 1 comments

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