Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs - the fight against phishing...

I got an email earlier today supposedly from HM Revenue & Customs saying “Confirm your tax refund”.  Immediately smelling a rat, or at least phishing or spam or virus or whatever I went on-line to find the actual HMRC to see what they say about this kind of thing. They say “Forward any suspicious emails to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk

So…I forwarded the dodgy email to them at that address.  Pretty soon I got a reply.  Did it say ‘thank you for forwarding your suspicious email to our suspicious email in box’ or similar?

No, I got a reply saying “The above message was not delivered due to the detection of virus "Mal/Phish-A" “

So there you go…if you get a dodgy email supposedly from Her Madge’s Tax and Revenue bear in mind that if it is actually a dodgy email it won’t get delivered…

I sent them this:

Dear HMRC

I got a suspicious email earlier today supposedly from yourselves.  I forwarded it to you as you suggest on your website.  It was rejected as a possible phishing email and not delivered.

If this is not a joke from someone with a neat line in irony perhaps you could tell me what is the point of forwarding suspicious emails to you if, when they are indeed suspicious, they get rejected so you never get to see them?

Yours sincerely


They don’t answer the phone so I don’t suppose they answer email either.  Or read it.  It's almost as if we're being had somewhere and that email address is a piece of taxpayer funded nonsense.