Australian Taxation Office Cautions Tax-Paying Citizens about Fake E-mails

Australia's tax regulator ATO (Australian Taxation Office) has advised tax-paying citizens for keeping watch about scam e-mails which have been detected as presently hitting their inboxes, published yahoo.com dated June 27, 2014.

Although circulating for pretty good time, the fraudulent electronic mail related to ATO appears as becoming more widespread when the financial annum is at its close, possibly abusing people who're planning to file their returns during the period.

Masquerading as the ATO, insurance companies, banks, Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), or any other institution, the scam e-mail tries to so trick Internauts that they would voluntarily give away personal information and/or have their PCs infected. Soon they would also lose money to the scammers, or worse, become victims of ID-theft.

The ATO's warning to tax-paying citizens follows from the hike in public complaints it received since March 1, 2014 about phishing e-mails that increased to 11,344 from 9,368 of March 1, 2013.

According to Todd Heather, Chief Technology Officer, anybody's personal information serves as prime input for his identity; therefore, safeguarding the same is no less vital than locking the house's main door everyday. Ato.gov.au published this dated June 24, 2014.

The ATO has initiated for raising community awareness about online frauds, so it has started one fresh video campaign via its web-page named ato.gov.au/identitycrime providing useful suggestions for safeguarding personal info.

Of these suggestions, a few are as follows: no taxpayer should mention his TFN (tax file number) in his curriculum vitae. It should be given solely to his employer once he has begun his job. The person must not share his private details like of TFN, bank A/C or myGov on social-networking websites. Aside these, he must reset his password once the old one is shared with close acquaintances else relatives.

In the meantime, similar as ATO cautioning consumers for being vigilant about scam e-mails, the Revenue Commissioners of Ireland government that collects taxes, during December 2013, too alerted taxpayers to fake electronic mails posing as being sent from it while attempting at extracting taxpayers' personal details in exchange of promise to reimburse them a tax amount.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/4/2014