25 September 2023

Tax Office pays out on scammers

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The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has issued a new warning about scammers targeting taxpayers.

Assistant Taxation Commissioner, Kath Anderson said the latest scamming method involved fraudsters initiating three-way telephone conversations between the scammer, the victim, and another scammer impersonating the victim’s tax agent.

“One recent example had a taxpayer unfortunately thinking the telephone conversation was legitimate, and ended up withdrawing thousands of dollars in cash and depositing it into a Bitcoin ATM, fearing the police had a warrant out for his arrest,” Ms Anderson said.

“Taxpayers expect to be contacted by the ATO during tax time, so scammers take advantage of this and often pretend to be the ATO, posing as a staff member, to swindle Australians out of their money.”

She said this was roughly the halfway point of tax time and there had been an increase in reports of scams in recent months.

“In September we typically see these high volumes continue, so we are warning the community to be on the lookout for things that don’t look or feel quite right,” Ms Anderson said.

“During July and August the ATO received over 7,000 scam reports to our dedicated phone line, with close to $190,000 being paid to scammers and over 1,600 people handing over their personal or financial information.”

She said that while new scams popped up from time to time, the most common was still the ‘fake tax debt’ phone scam, though the ‘fake refund’ and ‘refund for a fee’ scams were on the rise.

“Australians are generally pretty good at identifying scams but there has been a distinct increase in the level of scam sophistication,” Ms Anderson said.

“The cloned web addresses linked to scam emails are sometimes difficult to distinguish from ato.gov.au and the compromise of your personal information via this method may remain undetected with impacts only realised many months later.”

She said the ATO’s dedicated scams line was 1800 008 540.

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