IRS Online Email Scam - How to remove

Have you recently received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)? Well, that’s definitely an attempt to scam you since IRS officially claimed they never initiate contact with taxpayers by email, text messages or social media channels. That means regardless of what the letter you received says, it’s not true. Reportedly victims of this scam campaign have lost millions of US dollars, as well as private information.

Lately, it was reported that the IRS Online email scam was used to distribute very dangerous Emotet virus. So you can not only get scammed and lose money or your private data but also get your computer infected.

If you have received this spam letter, you should obviously not open it or follow instructions written there. Probably the worst thing you can do with the letter sent by the scammers pretending to be IRS – open the attachment to the letter. This will definitely infect your computer immediately with some kind of virus, possibly very dangerous one. In case you have done that and your computer is infected, please read this article to the end and learn how to protect your computer and remove all potentially unwanted programs that might be infiltrated into your system.

Variety of IRS Online Email Scams

There are a lot of versions of emails pretending to be sent by IRS, but the one distributing Emotet contains this text:

Subject: IRS Online
IRS_267699238_11052018.doc
Certification of Non-filling Letter.doc
Department of Treasure
If you need assistance, please contact me at 1-866-591

The first thing you need to carefully check before opening letters, especially if they end up on your spam folders – the sender. Usually, developers of Internal Revenue Service scam campaigns try to replicated email addresses and make them look like legitimate, authority names that could be owned by IRS. However, they will not succeed to do that and you will be able to recognize it. So look carefully and if you notice that something is not right, do not open the letter.

We have analyzed a lot of email scam campaigns, such as ‘I’m A Programmer Who Hacked Your Email’ scam, Customer Service Survey, Kohl’s ‘$75 Anniversary Coupon’ scam, and so on. They all are either very well crafted using social engineering techniques or written really poorly and makes no sense. So if the email looks too good and convincing, you should not open the attachment because it will probably be a computer virus. The same goes if the letter is a complete mess and you can’t get the point of it.

All in all, if you are in doubt about the email you have just received, google it before taking any further actions. This simple trick could possibly save you a lot of time and money.

IRS Never Contacts Users by the Email

It’s very easy to tell that all emails that are allegedly sent by IRS are nothing more than a scam because this institution publicly claimed that ’they. IRS highlights that these attempts of scam are mostly active on the fall period. By the way, IRS scammers can not only send you an email, but they can also knock on your door as well.

There are various reasons why someone would want to pretend to be an officer from IRS. Obviously, the main reason is to steal money, because that’s proven to be a very easy way to do that. Other than that, cyber criminals might want to steal your personal information – that’s very valuable as well. So if you are asked to fill some details about yourself as a taxpayer, never follow these instructions.

Lastly, as in this particular case, cyber criminals might use IRS scam campaigns to distribute malware, such as browser hijackers or adware. That’s not less dangerous – it can result in severe damage done to your system.

How To Deal With IRS Online Email Scam

As we have already informed you, it would e best to recognize such an email even before opening it. However, if you failed to do that due to the lack of information and opened it, or opened the file attached to it, there is a high chance that some kind of malware is operating on your computer right now.

The problem is that malware can be really tricky and invisible – all malicious behavior can be done in the background and you won’t be able to notice it. That’s why you should scan your system with anti-malware tool, such as Spyhunter. This program features a huge virus database and is able to recognize if some malicious files are on your computer during the scan. In addition to that, it is capable of removing those files automatically.

However, if you want to remove malware manually, you can use anti-malware software to find out the name of infection and then do it by yourself. Below this article, you will find detailed instructions on how to perform manual removal of malware.

Automatic Malware removal tools

How to remove IRS Online Email Scam using Windows Control Panel

Many hijackers and adware like IRS Online Email Scam install some of their components as regular Windows programs as well as additional software. This part of malware can be uninstalled from the Control Panel. To access it, do the following.

• Start→Control Panel (older Windows) or press Windows Key→Search and enter Control Panel and then press Enter (Windows 8, Windows 10).
• Choose Uninstall Program (if you don't see it, click in the upper right next to "View by" and select Category).
• Go through the list of programs and select entries related to IRS Online Email Scam . You can click on "Name" or "Installed On" to reorder your programs and make IRS Online Email Scam easier to find.
• Click the Uninstall button. If you're asked if you really want to remove the program, click Yes.
• In many cases anti-malware programs are better at detecting related parasites, thus I recommend installing Spyhunter to identify other programs that might be a part of this infection.