The Consumer advice center warns of alleged Elster emails with the subject: “Reminder: Information required for your tax refund.” This email letter, which is currently in circulation, states that a tax refund has allegedly been temporarily stopped. The reason given is “incomplete information” in the tax return.

Various signs indicate phishing emails

In order to enable the payment, a form should be filled out and submitted using the attached link. Typically, the wording “reminder” and “absolutely necessary” as well as the supposedly blocked payment are used to create targeted pressure in order to persuade recipients to take quick action.

There are also other signs of phishing: impersonal salutation, dubious sender address, pressure through “reminder” and “absolutely necessary” and a link in the email.

Experts point to Elster portal

The experts continue to say verbatim: “We advise ignoring such messages and moving them to the spam folder without being answered in order to protect personal and financial data. Tax matters should only be checked via the official Elster portal (“elster.de”) or directly via the responsible tax office. The experts have further attempted fraud in the name of German authorities also in this article here for you again compiled.

In all cases, the general rule is: under no circumstances react to it. People often wonder whether something was done wrong because they receive such spam messages. Here you can provide peace of mind.

If you don’t react, nothing can happen to you

Fraudsters now work with highly intelligent machines. These generate hundreds of number combinations every second – until at some point a real number comes out randomly, which is then written down.

The same applies to letter combinations and email addresses. In addition, your contact could have appeared in a data breach and thus fallen into the hands of fraudsters. In plain language this means: Even if you are not surfing on “dangerous sites”, you can be hit with a message here.

As long as you don’t react to it, nothing can happen to you. It can only become dangerous if you click on links and enter personal data such as passwords or account numbers.

Spam emails usually appear repeatedly

These spam emails usually appear in spurts every two or three months. You will then receive several messages spread over a few days. At some point the spam will stop again – until an artificial machine randomly comes up with your phone number or email address again in a few months.

In an example available to our editorial team, there were three different messages within a few days. Here, too, the recipient simply did not respond and even reported the messages as spam using the SMS function.

Advantage: After a while, your phone will recognize the sender and automatically forward the message to the spam folder without pushing the message to you.

From stefan.zeitler1@vnp.de (Stefan Zeitler)