Outline:
Email purporting to be from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) claims that your credit card was accidentally charged twice for your last tax bill and you are therefore owed a refund.
Analysis:
The email is not from the CRA and the promised refund does not exist. It is just one version of a long running series of phishing scams that have falsely claimed that recipients are eligible for a tax refund.
Clicking the link in the email takes you to a fraudulent website that asks you to claim your supposed refund by supplying your credit card numbers and other personal and financial information. All of the information you supply on the fake site can be collected by criminals and used to commit credit card fraud and identity theft.
The following Hoax-Slayer YouTube video provides more information about such tax refund phishing scams:
Subject: You have a new Refuned-#CRA-CANADA.When your last payment of your Impot, your credit card was charged twice for the settlement of your account (210.98 CAD.), to overcome this problem with our system we ask you to please follow the link below to restitution the amount debited accidentally.
Complete your Tax Refund
Please do not reply to this email. We are unable to respond to inquiries sent to this address. For immediate answers to your questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” located on CRA Revenue page or email.
Sincerely, we are sorry for this error..
©Canada Revenue & Agency, 2016. All rights reserved.
Last updated: October 1, 2016
First published: October 1, 2016
By Brett M. Christensen
About Hoax-Slayer
References
Canada Revenue Agency Tax Refund Phishing Scam
CRA – Protect yourself against fraud
Phishing Scams – Anti-Phishing Information
Importance Notice
After considerable thought and with an ache in my heart, I have decided that the time has come to close down the Hoax-Slayer website.These days, the site does not generate enough revenue to cover expenses, and I do not have the financial resources to sustain it going forward.
Moreover, I now work long hours in a full-time and physically taxing job, so maintaining and managing the website and publishing new material has become difficult for me.
And finally, after 18 years of writing about scams and hoaxes, I feel that it is time for me to take my fingers off the keyboard and focus on other projects and pastimes.
When I first started Hoax-Slayer, I never dreamed that I would still be working on the project all these years later or that it would become such an important part of my life. It's been a fantastic and engaging experience and one that I will always treasure.
I hope that my work over the years has helped to make the Internet a little safer and thwarted the activities of at least a few scammers and malicious pranksters.
A Big Thank You
I would also like to thank all of those wonderful people who have supported the project by sharing information from the site, contributing examples of scams and hoaxes, offering suggestions, donating funds, or helping behind the scenes.I would especially like to thank David White for his tireless contribution to the Hoax-Slayer Facebook Page over many years. David's support has been invaluable, and I can not thank him enough.
Closing Date
Hoax-Slayer will still be around for a few weeks while I wind things down. The site will go offline on May 31, 2021. While I will not be publishing any new posts, you can still access existing material on the site until the date of closure.Thank you, one and all!
Brett Christensen,
Hoax-Slayer
