With new technology comes new opportunities for scammers to try to take your hard earned money.  The use of email and clever website copying are giving  scammers effective tools to hatch their plots.  Now that everyone has heard that the new economic stimulus package has passed, many citizens have expectations that they will be receiving checks from the government.  Scammers are preying on this belief by constructing clever email campaigns that claim that a stimulus check will be issued to you once you provide certain information for verification purposes.  Often you are directed to a website that not only looks official but could almost be a literal copy of a real governmental website.  Once on the site, you are requested to fill out a form with your name, current address, date of birth and social security number so your stimulus check can be prepared.  Of course, once you do this you have been had.

A second variant on this scheme is the receipt of an email claiming that the IRS is holding a tax refund monies for you that were never disbursed.  Again, you are directed to a very official looking site where you are prompted to provide all of your personal details.  With this information, a scammer can begin obtaining government identification cards, credit cards, and loans in your name.  Now that it is tax season, another end use of your private data is to complete a bogus tax return in your name.  The scammer files the tax return with the IRS and request that your tax refund be mailed to the scammer.  You find out this has happened only after the IRS questions why you are filing a second income return after you already received your refund.  As you can imagine, this is a big mess to be in.

Remember, almost all communications from the government are conducted by letter.  Should you receive anything by email that requests your private details, chances are that the request is a scam.  Protect your private data and do all your research in advance as to whether the request is valid before you provide your private details to anyone.

Steps you can do to verify the legitimacy of a website and a request for your private information:

1. Check the spelling in the email referring you to the website, misspellings are often a tell-tale sign that the request is not real.

2. Check the spelling in the website, again misspellings are a bad sign. 

3. Check many of the other links and pages in the website.  Broken links or pages that do not make sense for that site are a dead giveaway that the site is a scam.

4. Check the URL address for the supposed governmental website versus a separate search request on a search engine for the same government site.  If the addresses are different but the content and format is almost identical if the not the same, chances are one of the sites is a copycat.

5. Conduct a search engine search for the name referenced in the email or the type of program or refund being referenced to see if there are any scam alerts posted on the Internet.

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