The victim of a self-tax scam receives a text message on his phone or e-mail that mentions, for example, a tax refund or an important message related to a tax refund.
Personal tax scams are not going to subside. Eevi Karvinen
Personal tax scams are not going away. The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom’s Cyber Security Center warned about scams related to the service in its weekly review last week. Now the police also agrees with the warnings.
The Eastern Finland police say that since the beginning of the year, eight criminal reports have been made to it regarding frauds or attempted frauds committed in the name of Personal Tax.
The largest sums of money obtained through scams have been from 20,000 euros to more than 40,000 euros.
This is how the scam works
Based on the crime report information, the method of self-tax fraud is as follows:
The victim of the scam receives a text message on his phone or a message in his e-mail, which mentions, for example, a tax refund or an important message related to a tax refund. The message contains a link with the word “own tax” in its name.
The victim of the scam clicks on the link, which opens a page similar to the login page of a mobile bank. Online banking credentials and personal identification number are entered on the page. The victim will still receive a request to confirm the bank transaction.
After some time, the victim of the scam discovers that all the funds in his own accounts and access rights accounts – for example, in the accounts of children, spouse, parents and companies – have been transferred abroad. In addition to this, a loan worth thousands of euros has been applied for in the name of the interested party, which has also been transferred abroad
Do this
If you act as described above by mistake, the police urges you to immediately call your own bank’s card blocking service number. You should ask the bank to also close the online banking credentials and, just to be sure, also the bank card. After this, a criminal report should be filed as quickly as possible.
If you notice what happened outside of office hours, you can also contact the emergency center.
If you receive a suspicious message on your phone, email or social media chat platform, you should not open the links in the messages. Online banking credentials should also not be entered on pages that open behind links. The police urges you to delete the messages immediately.
Real-looking scam pages
The police remind that official transaction services usually use a secure connection, if personal information is shown to customers in the service. A secure connection is recognized by the https prefix of the address displayed in the address bar of the browser program and depending on the browser by the image of a lock or other symbol.
Official transaction services, such as tax administration services, are usually not accessible without identification with online banking credentials, an identity card or a mobile certificate. Scam websites, on the other hand, usually do not require identification, or ask for other means of identification, for example a credit card number.
In the latest scams, the login page can look almost real. For this reason, it is important that you log into Omavero via the tax administration’s own website.