SOUTH AFRICAN REVENUE SERVICE (additional information provided by STEVEN JONES)
Refund payment scam (3 September 2024)
The latest scam is an email indicating you are eligible for a refund. To ‘complete your refund’, the scam asks you to submit SARS FICA documents. The scam leads you to click a link, which is linking to a fraudulent website. Make sure the email or SMS is genuine before you click on any link.
Protect yourself from scams and phishing!
- Do not open or respond to emails from unknown sources.
- Beware of emails or SMSs asking for personal, tax, banking or eFiling details.
- SARS will never send you hyperlinks to other websites.
Outstanding tax payment scam (10 June 2024)
Fraudsters are posing as SARS, luring taxpayers into a trap. Don’t fall for it! SARS never provides bank account numbers. If you need to make a payment, only use the official SARS payment channels, see the Make a Payment webpage (https://www.sars.gov.za/individuals/how-do-i-pay/make-a-payment/). The bank accounts used in the scam are fraudulent bank accounts, and SARS is following up with the relevant banks and authorities.
Note also that the e-mail address the scam is being sent from is not a SARS e-mail address. In this example, the email is shown as coming from “South African Revenue Service <payment@sarsmail.one>“. Official SARS e-mails end in “@sars.gov.za”.
Auto-assessment scam (17 July 2024)
This scam is in the form of an e-mail asking you to click on a link, seemingly from www.sars.gov.za but linking to a fraudulent website. When hovering over what looked like the official SARS website, the actual website to which the link would take you was clearly not that of SARS.
The e-mail in question had the wording “Notice of Assessment from SARS in the subject line, but the e-mail came from a Gmail account. All official SARS e-mail addresses end in “@sars.gov.za”.
Genuine SARS emails containing information about assessments, correspondence, notices of outstanding payments or refunds, or general information will not contain links. You would normally need to log into SARS e-filing (https://www.sarsefiling.co.za) for anything to do with your tax account, or the SARS website (https://www.sars.gov.za) for general information. To protect yourself, enter these website addresses manually—do not click on any links in an e-mail.
Tax review scam (24 October 2023)
Beware of a scam appearing to be an email from SARS with the subject title ‘SARS tax review’. Inside the email is a QR code (Quick Response code). Don’t scan it or point your mobile device camera at it—the QR code will take you to a fraudulent website.
The email in this example did not come from an official SARS e-mail address. It also contains threatening wording that reads “COURT SUMMONS AND BLACKLISTING Imminent: If this is not attended to within the next 24hours (sic).” Apart from the obvious typing error (no space between “24” and “hours”), any correspondence from SARS involving enforcement action will be on an official SARS letterhead and would normally be accessed via SARS e-filing.
More information
Examples of scam letters and e-mails (368 of them as at 6 September 2024) can be found on the SARS Scams and Phishing web page: https://www.sars.gov.za/targeting-tax-crime/scams-and-phishing/
