Beware of emails from 'Income Tax Department' which may lead to fake online site of banks

New Delhi: Online banking may be convenience banking, but there are costs attached with it if you are not careful enough.

A Quora member on Thursday posted how he received an email which was clearly a ploy to steel the confidential data he used for banking online.

He wrote that on Thursday morning he received an email alleged to be from the Income tax department offering him a tax refund of around Rs 20,000 from the tax file last year, and asked him to apply for refund by clicking on the given link. The email received by the Quora member read as follows:

The button was linked to a website http://firsindia.ga/xxxx, purported to be the Income Tax department's site.

The writer went on writing on Quora , “As soon as I saw this, I knew it was a SCAM. On a regular day, I would've just deleted this email and went ahead. But, I wanted to know the motive of the email. For someone who is unaware of, there are two things that made me realize that this is a SCAM link. 1) it is not a 'https' link, and it is a 'http' link. 

The writer added, “I just visited the website http://firsindia.ga in incognito mode and it was blank.

After opening the link provided in the email, there was a page that asked a list of bank to choose from, into an account in which your refund will be processed."

The moment one logs in using one's internet banking username and password in the fake site, the details get shared with the hackers, who use the data later to steal money from one's bank account.

"I have used a few of the bank websites that were mentioned in the SCAM website, and the screenshots of the SCAM website look strikingly similar to the original net banking login pages of these banks", said the Quora writer.