Hi all - have you recently been affected by a tax scam?
Ahead of EOFY, the federal government is again warning people to beware of promises of tax refunds leading them to fake myGov and ATO websites built to steal login information.
Have you been affected by one of these scams or a similar tax-based attempt to steal your money or information?
Or has exposure to scam texts, emails and calls made you ignore legitimate messages from myGov/ATO and led to you missing out in other ways? Let us know.
There are so many scam messages in our SMS and Emails that legitimate comms from the Gov agencies can get lost in the flood.
I had a number of SMS from MyGov about updating my details for some refund. I ignored as scam. As it turned out, they wanted my account details to start crediting my Medicare rebates.
Interesting to hear, Greg - how long did it take you to realise the texts were legitimate? And how much worth of rebates do you think you were missing out on?
It just twigged to me that maybe I should just check my My Gov account to see if there was in fact something there. Usually I only concern myself with that at tax time.
Medicare wanted my bank account details, and once done, a couple of rebates came flowing in, so nothing lost. But who knows how long Medicare would have kept those rebates in the system before I actioned the requirement.
Today, I received what I am pretty sure was a scam taxation email. The clues I used were (1) that the “From” details in my Inbox said “Australian Taxation Services”, and (2) the Subject said “Australia Tax Return”- neither of which seemed to me to be the way the ATO would write emails. After deleting this email, I did do a direct log-in to the ATO website, and there was nothing there for me.
Welcome aboard to the Community @gerrymcc
It would have been interesting to see what the URL of the sender was. If genuine it should have been ato.gov.au.
But the ATO promises to never have any click on links. They just tell you to log on to their MyGov portal and find messages there.
I would assume that most everyone has had some form of scam. It puzzles me as to why it seems impossible for authorities to prevent them. Admittedly with total ignorance of computer technology I would assume that those blessed (cursed?) with the technical knowledge of how to prevent this criminal activity are hampered by non-technical constraints outside their control.
Surely the problem is big enough for an “international” approach to tackle internet crime? There has to be a source to engage in computer crime so would not a universal agreement that some form of registration be necessary to enter the “computer world” be mandated and to give some deterrent to crime on this entry applicant need to hold a verifiable bank account to be able to access the computer world.
No doubt there would be many objections to any controls from the computer world but if that world cannot control evil then they will have to live with controls imposed on them by external forces.
Interesting to hear other ideas and what others think. Maybe someone with an economic, legal and computer background might elaborate on my humble suggestion?
Sorry to say, but the Internet genie is out of the bottle, and the world embraces it with open arms. Anyone can access it.
There are a few places where the authorities have stepped in to protect their citizens from the perils of communications. DPRK is one. Want to live there?
The best defense against scams is just basic common sense and knowledge.
