Purporting to be from the email address refund@ato.com.au it said I was entitled to a $250 refund on my Visa or Mastercard.

I knew it was fraudulent immediately, of course. The ATO doesn’t have my Yahoo! address, doesn’t communicate by unsolicited email and doesn’t give refunds on credit cards.

Also, I had seen a media release from the Tax Office on a different but related scam.

The Tax Office is warning people to be wary of a fraudulent email being circulated that claims to offer a 30% discount on their taxes. The email uses the Tax Office logo and the words ‘Cut Off Taxes Program (COTP) has been released – Join Now’ in the subject heading …

The subject heading in my email was “Message from the Australian Government”.

This article in The Age suggests the dodgy ATO emails are now common.

The scam ATO email, which promises a $250 bonus on top of a tax return, links the taxpayer to an online form that asks for personal details including ATM pin, credit card details and tax file number. Instead of submitting the form online, the website asks for a printed version to be mailed to an address.

While on one hand these scams are getting more sophisticated, they might suck more people in if they employed someone who speaks English.

My email asked me to complete the “formular”.

I’m not even a customer of the Commonwealth Bank.

But every message needs to be read and marked as spam, which wastes time and effort.

I like to read emails straight away, and as soon as I get an alert there’s a new message I tend to visit the inbox and read it. These are some of the recent emails:

Sent by customer@commbank.com.au

Dear CommonWealth Bank Account Holder ,

We are currently updating our online banking services , and due to this upgrade we sincerely call your attention to follow below link and confirm your online account details . Failure to confirm the online banking details will suspend you from accesing your account online . Due to this , you are requested to follow the provided steps and confirm your Online Banking details for the safety of your accounts .

link deleted *

* We use the latest security SSL measures to ensure that your online banking experience is safe and secure. The administration asks you to accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused and expresses gratitude for cooperation .

Thank you for your cooperation ,
CommonWealth Bank Group

Sent by qjrrjp@google.com.au

Dear Commonwealth Bank member,

You have received this email because you or someone had used your account from different locations. For security purpose, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.

In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your online banking details.

The help speed up to this process, please access the following link so we can complete the verification of your Commonwealth Online Banking account registration information.

link deleted

If we do not receive the appropriate account verification within 48 hours, then we will assume this Commonwealth account is fraudulent and will be suspended.

The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your bank account has not been fraudulently used and to combat the fraud from our community.

Sent by security@commbank.com.au

Dear Customer,

Your NetBank access has been locked as a result of too many incorrect logon attempts.

In order to re-activate, please LOG ON to your NetBank account and follow the steps.

Sincerly,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Customer Services

Sent by admin@common.net

Dear Valued Customer,

This email is your official notification from Commonwealth Bank .Your online NetBank has expired on 25-05-2009 ,if you want to continue using our service you have to renew your acount if not your account will be deactivated and deleted

To continue please click the link below:

link deleted

Many Thanks and Kind Regards – Commonwealth Bank Customer Department

© Commonwealth Bank of Australia 2009 ABN 48 123 123 124

Final comment: Poorly written using dodgy email addresses, but very annoying.

It surprises me they’re getting through the Google and Yahoo! spam filters.

I don’t imagine the bank is too happy about what’s going on either. They say:

Hoax Emails – There are a large number of spam emails being sent to customers claiming to be from the Bank. Do not be duped. DO NOT CLICK LINKS IN THESE EMAILS NO MATTER HOW GENUINE THEY MAY LOOK. To check if an email is genuine a copy will be available in NetBank for viewing. If you suspect you have received a spam email, please forward it as an attachment to hoax@cba.com.au and then delete the email.

According to Spam Fighter, the bank last year alerted federal authorities. While the e-mails’ origin is not clear, it said the messages seemed to be “international”.

“Olesya” sent me an email claiming to have discovered my details “in a site of acquaintances”. Google is very good at screening spam, but this one seems to have slipped through.

Olesya’s email address was (random=made up by me) pw”random”@auto-industrial.pt, hardly personal.

Anyhow, this is some of what she writes:

I am a Russian woman. My motherland is Russia. My city is St-Petersburg. I hope you don’t think bad about Russian women. I know that many bad people have created bad impression about Russian women. I want to say at once that I won’t ask you for money. My girlfriend will give me money for my travel to Australia. I want to find love only. And probably big happiness. Only serious relations.

She goes onto say: “I want true and serious relations. I don’t understand and I don’t want to play game. I will be happy to learn better if you are ready to start build serious relations. We can try just for beginning. We can try to create love and happiness. I think that there are no distances and barrier for love. Only people create miracles.”

I know people who have strung scammers along to see what happens. I’m not inclined to do that.

All I will say to Olesya: if you’re genuine, good luck. If you’re a scammer, bad luck.

Young people, believed to be Israeli or Iraqi (odd mix), claim to be art students earning a living.

I’ve personally had two different sellers knock on my door in the past six months.

According to authorities, the young people are probably on visitors visas and operating illegally, contrary to immigration laws and the Door-to-Door Sales Act.

The Act requires the presentation of ID and a 10-day cooling-off period.

I never got that far into the pitch to determine those questions, but a woman who spoke to the newspaper said no such bonafides were presented.

I’ve seen emails from police and government departments tonight which suggest the scammers are on the run to Esperance, which rather supports the theory they are acting illegally.

One suggestion is the paintings are mass produced in China for $5 each, sold to scammers for $75 each and sold to mug punters for about $200 each, unless “discounted”.

Quite a racket!

Update: Wikipedia has an entry for the student art scam.

It says the scam is a confidence trick in which cheap, mass-produced paintings or prints are misrepresented as original works of art, often by young people pretending to be art students trying to raise money for art supplies or tuition fees.

“In some early instances of the scam the sellers represented themselves as Israeli art students, but the scam is now international, with instances of Chinese, French, Chilean, and other nationalities posing as art students or dealers in Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand and the United States since at least 2000. The art is often sold door-to-door, bypassing exhibition sites or art galleries.”

Most of the mass-produced prints and paintings are said to originate in Asia.

Hamarana commented it was a great idea, but not one that could or should be replicated.

It seems many wannabes don’t share that view. Search google for the topic and see what I mean.

Opportunists and scam artists have jumped on the concept in spam proportions. The original is worth praising for its sheer ingenuity. The rest are vultures feeding on the carcase of an idea.

According to Wikipedia: The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.”

Clever, but no thanks.