We know that scam emails and calls pretending to be from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) are a popular method for distributing malware (and one that isn’t reliant on tracking the latest headlines. Just how bad is the problem? Last year, the ATO received more than 26,000 reports of tax-related scams.
That 26,000 presumably only represents a tiny proportion of the attempts at sending these kinds of scams, since many will be automatically captured by business security systems and savvy users will know to ignore any that get through. But spare a thought for the ATO: the prevalence of such scams makes using email for business communication rather more difficult. The ATO has begun using email for a range of communications, but that process only began in earnest in 2012.
If you do encounter a scam email claiming to be from the ATO, forward it to the ATO’s dedicated email address: [email protected].
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.