Carrying the IRD authorized letterhead along with the translation of Maori title; the e-mail informed Standring that there was a tax refund worth $54.90 waiting for her to claim.

Furthermore, the e-mail stated that to maintain security the department would record the IP address of the recipient (here Standring), as well as threatened of penalties in case incorrect information was provided. All these naturally made Standring uncomfortable.

She became even more alarmed when she realized that the e-mail supposedly from IRD strangely arrived on December 31, 2010.

As a result, she tried finding the e-mail's veracity via telephoning the Inland Revenue Department, which told her that it knew about the incidences going on while asserted that the particular e-mails were simply a scam.

Explained a Spokesperson of the Department, the aforementioned type of refunds weren't conducted through electronic mail and that the Department was investigating into the incident for determining its source. Hawkesbaytoday.co.nz reported this on January 8, 2011.

Meanwhile, as for the IRD itself, it too is alerting of the scam by making a post on its authorized Internet site, while urging everybody who gets the fraudulent e-mail for letting the Department know about it without any delay. Taxpayers similar as Stranding are as well being recommended that they must erase such e-mails completely.

Importantly, the Department's tax officers outline that the most notable red signals of scam e-mails are weak English and incorrect spellings since their creators generally utilize translation programs for writing them.

Conclusively, it isn't just Standring in New Zealand whom a phishing e-mail related to tax refund has targeted. During the 1st week of January 2011, Nicole Botting, another woman living in Invercargill (Southland, New Zealand) too complained that an e-mail came to her purportedly from a tax re-imbursement firm that promised her a tax-refund worth a few hundred dollars. IRD said that that e-mail was also part of a scam.