I saw today that TVNZ ran a piece on their breakfast show this morning.  You can watch it here.

Spread the word: IRD current policy is that they will NEVER email you and ask you for personal details, and it is extremely unlikely they will ring you and ask you to pay taxes.  IRD usually ONLY communicate by post, and mostly to us as your tax agent.

The problem is that the scammers are getting cleverer – using genuine IRD logos and somehow making their Caller ID look like the genuine IRD’s 0800 number.  They are using fear (of paying penalties) to entice the public to hand over money.  One taxpayer has reportedly paid over $6000. Ouch.

All our clients are linked to our practice tax agency, so all and any tax queries are handled via EPPL.  If you do get calls from “IRD” we strongly recommend you ignore the call and refer the matter to us or to the IRD.

There are plenty of other scammers in this digital environment: I recently discovered that the anti-virus app on my cell-phone was texting a regular text message to the Czech Republic!  That explained why my credit was being used up regularly…

We have noticed a lot of local people getting evening phone calls from random people offering to fix the household computer problems that their home computer has communicating to the IT world.  Bogus.  These scammers will get you to load remote-access software that will give them control over your files and data (including stored passwords).  They’ll ask you for money for the service, too.

Banks are particularly hit hard.  We get plenty of Kiwibank and ANZ scamming messages (not from the bank!).
 
Here’s what we recommend:

• Do not respond to these “scammy” messages.
• Forward such messages to your known bank contact to deal with
• Never give in to random or unprompted requests.
• Never agree to pay any money to random requests over the phone
• Never give your login, account number or password details to anyone by phone or email.
• Be alert for scammers!