It's easy to get suckered into an online scam, even when you're
generally cautious. Phishing mails can be very convincing to the
untrained eye. So when we tell you there's a new Income-Tax related scam
doing the rounds here in India, you need to pay attention.
Karthik
Srinivasan a freelance communications consultant for digital marketing
posted a curious story to Twitter earlier today. He described receiving a
text message, supposedly from the Income Tax department, saying he was
eligible for a tax rebate.
This is obviously a plausible
message, and further inspection of the message doesn't turn up any
glaring mistakes, name changes, or sender details that might tip a
person off. Luckily though, Srinivasan said he remembered the Bitly URL
shortening tool (something he uses often in his line of work) allows you
to reverse search a shortened link to see where it's taking you and how
many clicks it's received. Upon doing that, Srinivasan found the URL
led to a Russian domain (surprise surprise eh?), and the URL had only
been created a day before.