I am such a moron!

Last December, before leaving for the holidays, I was struggling to collect financial information to file my UK taxes (the deadline is end of January). Suddenly, as if by divine intervention, I got an email with return address HMRC.gov (That is “Her majesty’s revenue and customs”. ). This email said, in short, “We have sorted out your taxes for you, you will receive a refund”. How nice of them. I even blogged about how nice they were here. Many people had told me that UK taxes were a lot easier than US taxes, so this was perhaps not completely unexpected. I went back to the US for the holidays feeling good about being on the up-and-up with the UK government.

Well, if it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Coming back to the UK, I didn’t think much more about taxes until I started thinking about US taxes (which promise to be a bit of a mess this year). So on Feb 1st, coincidentally one day after UK taxes were due, I set about collecting all my information together. Among other things, I figured the US would probably want to know how much I was taxed by the UK. So I went back and looked at the email sent by HMRC.gov.

And this was where I realized I was duped.

Although the email really does appear to have HMRC.gov as a return address, I was nonetheless became a bit suspicious of some of the links in the email. Exploring around a bit more, and checking out the real HMRC.gov website, I finally came to realize that this email is some complicated phishing scheme where you are supposed to enter your bank info so that they can take all your money.




In the words of the great Homer Simpson...












The good news is that I did not enter any bank information, so they will not get all my money.

The bad news is that I did not file my taxes on time either.