CANBERRA: The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has issued a public reminder to taxpayers to be aware that tax time is also a prime time for scammers and they should “stop and think” before parting with any personal details or money.
Assistant Taxation Commissioner Kath Anderson said 48,084 scams were reported to the ATO between July and October last year. “We have already seen a five-fold increase in scams from January to May this year and typically expect further increases during the tax time period,” Assistant Commissioner Anderson said. “Already this year, the ATO has registered over 17,067 scam reports,” she said. “Of these, 113 Australians handed over $1.5 million to fraudsters with about 2,500 providing some form of personal information, including tax file numbers.” She said one victim had lost $900,000 to scammers over the course of several months, even borrowing money from family and friends.
“The large number of people lodging their tax returns means scammers are particularly active, so it’s important to keep an eye out for anything that looks suspicious and to protect your private information,” ,” Assistant Commissioner Anderson said. She said people were generally good at catching and reporting scams, but some scams were harder to spot than others. “Scammers locate genuine ATO numbers from our website and project these numbers in their caller ID in an attempt to legitimise their call — a form of impersonation known as spoofing,” she said. “While we do make thousands of calls per week to the community, our outbound calls do not project numbers on caller ID. ‘If one appears, it’s most likely a scam.”
