Beware of bogus callers

Many people are receiving calls and messages apparently from the Inland Revenue. There has been a huge increase just recently with many people being contacted by fraudsters and the outcome is that many people have lost large amounts of money.

According to the Inland Revenue, in the 12 months up to April 2021, they had 1,154,300 people contact them about a suspicious call that they thought had come from the Revenue. Of these, 576,960 had been offered tax rebates which didn’t exist.

At the same time, the Inland Revenue worked with telephone companies to remove 3,000 bogus phone numbers and they have also had 15,700 websites taken down as they were imitating the Gov.uk site. They also responded to 443,300 telephone scams, up by 135% on the previous year.

How do you protect yourself from this type of scam? In general, the Inland Revenue do not call you nor email or text you, but they will write to the address that they have for you.

The Inland Revenue request that people are very cautious if they are contacted by someone claiming to work for them. There are many fraudsters calling, emailing and texting people pretending to be from the Inland Revenue.

They suggest that if you have any suspicions, you contact the Inland Revenue straight away. The quickest way to do this is to go to gov.uk and search for ‘scams checklist’

To avoid being caught out by scammers we suggest:

• Don’t give any personal details, especially your bank information, to anyone who calls, texts or emails you.

• Instead, we suggest you contact the organisation trying to contact you by looking for their official website or contact us and we will do this for you.