PSA: There’s A Very Convincing And Not At All Obvious MyGov Email Scam Doing The Rounds

A new scam email pretending to be a “refund service” for myGov is doing the rounds and if it wasn’t so obviously fake it would nearly be convincing.

The phishing message was shared on Reddit on Saturday which showed a screenshot of the email’s subject and attempts at myGov branding and Government-level language.

It claims the recipient has an “outstanding refund from mygov” which can be accessed by clicking the absolutely-not-suspicious link embedded in the email.

‘MyGov-Refund service’ scam
by u/in19ninety in australia

Honestly, a vague glance at this and I’d probably believe it. It has all the visual colours and cues of the myGov aesthetic but take more than half a second of looking at it and you’d realise that this email is definitely not from the Australian Government.

First things first — the email subject. It’s all in lowercase. Also, no email from myGov gives you any more information than “You have a message from myGov in your inbox”. You know, that surefire way to make your heart fall out of your ass in fear you’ve done something to upset the tax office gods.

The next obvious tell is the logo at the top of the email. I mean, look at it. It’s stretched to shit and looks like ass. Looking at that for more than a moment would get the cogs turning in your head that something is certainly not right here.

Look, I’ll give it to these scammers — the attempt at writing like a government body is not bad. They certainly gave it a red-hot go, but I don’t think the legit myGov has anything called the “Refund Service” nor does it have testimonials (???) in its emails.

If you get any emails from myGov that say anything more than a vaguely threatening alert about a new message in your actual myGov inbox, you can pretty much chalk it up to being a big fake scam. But good try though, phishers.