If taxpayers wish to get a compensation for the taxes they have paid through out the year, they are expected to submit a request. The final deadline is 18th of April. However, while some people might be expecting to get some refunds, some might lose coins because of naive nature. The end of last week was marked with a discovery of a new phishing scam which opts to take advantage out of the situation. Specifically, employees that work in institutions that deal with tax refunds are targeted. It is possible that they will receive deceptive emails from people that pretend to be someone they are not.
Of course, regular taxpayers can also be targeted with phishing scams. Hackers hope that they will be able to trick people into voluntarily giving away their confidential information and credentials. For this purpose, taxpayers might receive emails that are allegedly originating from reputable services, focused on returning tax refunds. However, if tax facilities require users to send confidential details via email letters, this should not be taken lightly. Legitimate facilities would not demand such information via email conversation.
When tax services are targeted, scammers usually pretend to be other people and request that the bank account which is to receive the compensation for taxes would be modified. However, facilities should be extremely careful while granting such orders. We do realize that these employees might be working non-stop as there are less and less time to request for tax refunds, but that does not mean that clients’ privacy and security should be jeopardized as a consequence. If a client wishes to make modifications to his/her request, tax specialists should go that extra mile and attempt to contact the actual person via phone conversation.
One of the ways that tax specialists could be deceived is that requests to alter tax refund submissions are sent from legitimate email addresses. How does that happen? Well, a person might be using weak credentials and scammers had no problem in cracking them. For this reason, people are always advised to set strong and complicated passwords that would be difficult to guess. The more complex combinations of letters, symbols and numbers the better. If you are using a password, like letmepass123, you are definitely risking to become a target of hackers. It is also extremely dangerous to re-use passwords even if the selected code is hard to guess. If hackers somehow manage to become aware of it, they will be able to access not one, but multiple accounts that are protected by the same credential.
Before trusting email letters, make sure to contact your tax company and ask whether they actually need your confidential information. Specialists should contact individual taxpayers and inquire whether they really do wish to change destination accounts that will receive tax refunds.
Source: in.pcmag.com.
