The Lemon Fool

I've just had an email from HMRC, entirely unsolicited. It was to an email address I might have used in the past with HMRC, but definitely not in the last couple of years.

It starts "Dear customer".

My first thought was, of course, scam. But I examined the headers and the URL links and it actually seems legit.

It has a link to an online version of the email here https://content.govdelivery.com/account ... ns/2173674 (govdelivery.com is used by gov.uk as an emailing platform)

I see it contains one typo, a lot fewer than most spam

On the gov.uk "recognising phishing" page https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... ing-emails there's a section on "Help and support emails" which describes it in general terms.

Anybody else get it, and have any clue what triggered it?

Scott.

I got one, and forwarded it to the phishing email address (of course if it were phishing, they'd have hacked that address!) and got the response it was genuine.

The message clearly wasn't proofread, and I don't have a HMRC Business account, but I suspect incompetence, not enemy action. I did point that out to them!

Yes, I got it too, and was a little wary so I didn't click on the link and plan to investigate it tonight.

I also see it refers to "HMRC Business Help and Support Emails", so I wonder if it is just for businesses.

--kiloran

kiloran wrote:I also see it refers to "HMRC Business Help and Support Emails", so I wonder if it is just for businesses.

Yes the email address of mine it was sent to might have been the one I used when I was registered as self-employed, but I've been unregistered for quite a while now.

Scott.

swill453 wrote:

kiloran wrote:I also see it refers to "HMRC Business Help and Support Emails", so I wonder if it is just for businesses.

Yes the email address of mine it was sent to might have been the one I used when I was registered as self-employed, but I've been unregistered for quite a while now.

Scott.

I think they've banged it out to everyone registered for SA, judging by what arrived at the email addresses I control.

I too received one. I could not understand why, and assumed it was phishing so have deleted it.

Dod

I wonder if I dare to click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom?

Mine to is to an email address I used to use when self employed, which was about 15 years ago.

Slarti

HMRC does not have my email address, so if I got such an email I would 100% know it was spam.

I too have had a few of these, but not recently. Also, I was registered as self-employed between 1998 & 2006, using a particular email address which I reserve for officialdom(!) Again, same as other people, it did look as if it might be official, but as I am no longer working, and have no intention of starting again, I deleted it without responding.

ten0rman

Got another one, equally illiterate, but the unsubscribe button seemed to do something

Yes me too. On the "subscriber preferences" page it seems I'm somehow subscribed to "SA 2016-17".

Scott.

I complained got this response from them:


Thank you for your email. I can confirm that this is a genuine email from HMRC. Thank you also for your feedback. We will take this on board when we are designing future emails for our customers, as we are always looking at how we can continually improve. This email was not to our usual standard and we will be working hard to ensure that future messages meet our content control checks. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.