Identity Thieves Beat Obama to Stimulus Package Punch:

Although the U.S. government’s economic stimulus package hasn’t even gotten out of Congress, scammers aren’t waiting; they’ve launched multiple campaigns that tempt users into revealing personal information, a security researcher warned today.

One spam-and-scam example, said Dermot Harnett, a principal researcher at Symantec Corp., poses as a message from the Internal Revenue Service, and claims that the recipient qualifies for something called a “stimulus payment.”

“After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity, we have determined that you are eligible to receive a stimulus payment,” the bogus e-mail reads. The message then tells the user to download the attached document, supposedly a form that must be submitted to the IRS.

The document, in fact, is an identity-stealing tool that asks users to provide personal information, much or all of it data that the actual IRS would presumably have on file, said Harnett.

See the full report at ComputerWorld.