The taxman has urged South Africans to ignore the SMS and email scams and not to click on any links. Picture: Henk Kruger African News Agency (ANA)
Cape Town - The SA Revenue Service (Sars) has warned taxpayers about two of the latest scams targeting them.
One arrives as an SMS text message and the other via email, summoning the reader to court.
In a notice on the Sars web page, the taxman urged unsuspecting taxpayers to ignore the messages and not to fall for the con by clicking on any links sent either to their phones or their email addresses.
The text message scam, also known as smishing, involves a “PayFast” SMS asking the receiver to click on a link to receive a payment from the revenue service.
The other new scam arrives via an email in which the scammers claim to be Sars employees sending a notice with a link to a “court order”. This is known as phishing.
Sars said: “Members of the public are randomly emailed with false ‘spoofed’ emails made to look as if these emails were sent from Sars, but they are in fact fraudulent emails aimed at enticing unsuspecting taxpayers to part with personal information such as bank account details.”
Sars gave examples and said they include emails that appear to be from returns@sars.co.za or refunds@sars.co.za indicating that taxpayers are eligible to receive tax refunds.
“These emails contain links to false forms and fake websites made to look like the real thing, but with the aim of fooling people into entering personal information such as bank account details which the criminals then extract and use fraudulently.”
An email message of the sort Sars mentioned was received by the “Cape Argus”.
It did not even bother to pretend it was from Sars and used a numbered Wits university student login that ended up in the Spam box.
It simply read: “Hi Good Morning, Please find attached sars summon below for your reference record. DOWNLOAD HERE. Kind Regards”
Sars said they would never request banking details in any communication received via post, email or SMS and would never send any hyperlinks to other websites
Previously, Sars commissioner Edward Kieswetter said: “Sars will leave no stone unturned to hunt and find these criminals. This is no idle threat, be warned.”
Speaking of similar attacks on bank clients, chief risk officer at African Bank Piet Swanepoel warned consumers to be careful, especially with Black Friday online shopping deals coming up this month.
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za
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