Trading Standards Cautions Residents about Fake HMRC E-mails

Officials from Trading Standards recently urged residents of Widnes and Runcorn (Warrington, United Kingdom) for being watchful of one scam e-mail that poses as message from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC); reported liverpoolecho.co.uk dated August 29, 2015.

An individual residing in Halton reportedly brought the notice of the officials to a message he received that asserted he was entitled to certain tax refund. It also directed him for clicking one given web-link so the request could be processed.

But according to one Spokesman from Trading Standards, HMRC wouldn't ever dispatch the kind of e-mail. Liverpoolecho.co.uk reported this.

The Spokesman said that anybody being impacted from scams was urged to talk to a specialist officer of Trading Standards at numbers 0151-511-8775 else 0151-511-8785. The officers were already putting efforts to assuage people of Halton who had unwittingly given away pounds in the thousands to scammers, he continued.

In case the officers were unavailable at the time of calling; then residents were urged to leave a contact number in addition to their names. For any advice regarding any issue, they may call 0345 404 0506 else the Citizens Advice Consumer Helpline, the Spokesman added.

Disturbingly, it's because of the aforementioned kind of scam e-mails which are leading to a continual increase of tax-related fraudulent electronic mails, remark security analysts.

Moreover according to the latest statistical figures from online news site, HMRC received reports of almost 51,000 phishing electronic mails during April-July 2014 that was twice as many as during April-July 2013.

In the meantime, HMRC isn't the sole tax-collecting body being targeted thus. Other renowned tax collecting agencies worldwide too had become targets of cyber-criminals' attacks, like Kelowna Police of Canada's British Columbia, which according to news report of July 2015, got many complaints about a variety of phishing campaigns posing as being from CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) the authorized taxing agency of Canada. Accordingly, they cautioned people towards imbibing some precautions for the protection of their sensitive information. As per them, the scams were especially crafted for grabbing citizens' financial or other personal data so as for stealing their precious money.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/10/2015