I received an email at the beginning of April with the subject “Your Tax Refund Information is Enclosed”. It certainly caught my attention, but then I realized it was from Turbotax, which I don’t use. Before writing it off as a lame phishing attempt, I opened it just to see just how lame of an attempt it was.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was a marketing email from the folks at Intuit. Obviously, someone had read up on crafting their email subject lines for maximum open rates. It probably eked out more than a few sales of Turbotax, but it just seems so spammy, especially after receiving a few more of these emails before April 15th.
I used to think of Intuit as an upstanding outfit, but this and Intuit’s campaign against simplified tax returns (via ma.tt) will make me think twice before using one of their products at home or at work.
TL;DR Intuit uses their customers’ customers to drive adoption of their payments solution. The screenshot below is where one is led after clicking the “view…