Operation Bamboozled?

Oh my goodness, we received a rather out of the ordinary letter from the HMRC Fraud Investigations Officer yesterday morning, but we're not actually 100% sure it's the real deal .......

...... to be honest, we've got doubts as to it's authenticity and it's put us in a right quandary!

Firstly, why us? As you know, we are the most devoted of charity shop shoppers and as tax payers we always tick the Gift Aid box if ever asked, but the Higher HMRC Officer has asked us about a very specific charity and two "persons of interest" connected to said charity, who we "may" have donated too. Well, to the best of our knowledge, we have never donated to them of a knowingly type nature, honest gov!

However, to Darrell something didn't seem quite right, he's watched and listened to an awful lot of programmes about scammers and in his opinion he said he didn't think we should fill in the questionnaire milli vanilli willy nilly, without undertaking our own due diligence, because, perhaps, this was a new elaborate sort of phishing scam?

We've looked up the charity and, as much as we could, the people "implicated", we've also looked up Mr HMRC and called his number, no official HMRC welcome or irritating holding music, just a not available at the moment message ....... after that we spent ages looking up scams on the official HMRC website and we're still none the wiser .......

So, in the end we emailed Mr HMRC, we got a reply within twelve hours and were assured that all was well and this was a genuine investigation, but even now Darrell is still hesitant, I mean, he says, anyone can set up a fake e-mail. Plus in Darrell's expert opinion, shouldn't the return envelope be an official, printed, freepost brown envelope?  What we've got is a really cheap, flimsy window envelope, certainly not of Basildon Bond quality. Sometimes it's like living with Jacques Cousteau when Darrell's got a full investigative bit between his teeth!

We not even sure how much of this matter we can actually divulge in public, even though we don't actually think we can assist in any of their enquiries. However, after discovering that for our time in completing and returning said questionnaire we are the ones actually responsible for paying the postage! So, despite the fear of repercussions for none compliance, we've decided to be guided by Darrell's initial gut feelings and not on this occasion fulfilling the brief!  What do you think?