
Brilliant
So, you have the nous to use IT systems in a more creative way, and you use that for an attempted scam attack on one of the few authorities which has a virtually limitless budget to come after you. Well, duh.
Computer systems operated by the UK's tax authority have been subjected to a cyber attack in an attempted tax scam, it has said. HMRC said that it suspects five men it arrested of using "illegally obtained personal data from third parties" to set up fake tax self-assessment accounts online in a bid to "steal large sums of …
It's flippant statements like this that do nobody any good.
Yes, keep the pressure up. Yes, go after the big tax dodgers as well.
But since the "big" tax dodgers make up less than 10% of the alleged dodged tax, keep after the little shitty fraudsters as well.
The biggies are usually working within the strict letter of the law (which I'm not trying to condone) - many of the little guys are not just cheating HMRC but are often engaged in much more serious criminal activity
I would have thought that you'd go for the big tax avoiders first. If they make up 10% of avoided tax, by definition there are not that many of them avoiding this massive amount of tax, so you go for them first.
I think the expression is something like "go for the low hanging fruit first".
Log into the Self Assessment section and half the time (depends what page you come from) the Ask A Question link in the main menu doesn't work.
Or how about this: there's a way to send a message to HMRC, but it's unformatted text (not even line breaks are registered) and it doesn't support any threading. This stuff's been built by the lowest bidder.
HMRC’s online systems proved extremely resilient to these attacks - they correctly identified and prevented the vast majority of false repayment attempts (my emphasis)
So they didn't block all the dodgy transactions then? Nice headline grabbing figure of £500k that they could have got away with, but how much did they actually get away with? Has it been recovered?
The government of the Philippines has welcomed the decision by giant business process outsourcer Concentrix Corporation to forgo tax incentives and instead allow its staff to continue working from home for the foreseeable future. The nation feels that subsidising outsourcers' bottom lines does nothing to boost the local economy.
The Philippines imposed lengthy and strict COVID-19 lockdowns that saw its substantial business process outsourcing sector quickly adapt to working from home. The nation's government supported that move by continuing to offer the pre-COVID subsidies it offered to outsourcers that run offices located in certain special economic zones.
Those subsidies have subsequently been removed, and the requirement to operate from special economic zones restored.
Infosys celebrated the first anniversary of the e-filing portal it built for India's tax authorities fixing another prominent glitch – this time a search functionality error.
Complaints about the error streamed in to India's Income Tax Department, which tweeted about the error on Tuesday.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have arrested about 2,000 people and seized $50 million in a sweeping operation crackdown of social engineering and other scam operations around the globe.
In the latest action in the ongoing "First Light", an operation Interpol has coordinated annually since 2014, law enforcement officials from 76 countries raided 1,770 call centers suspected of running fraudulent operations such as telephone and romance scams, email deception scams, and financial crimes.
Among the 2,000 people arrested in Operation First Light 2022 were call center operators and fraudsters, and money launderers. Interpol stated that the operation also saw 4,000 bank accounts frozen and 3,000 suspects identified.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces.
UIDAI promotes the cards as "a single source offline/online identity verification" for tasks ranging from passport applications, accessing social welfare schemes, opening a bank account, dispersing pensions, filing taxes or buying insurance.
Although Bill Gates has lauded Aadhaar cards for improving access to services, the scheme has been the subject of many security-related scares as inappropriate access to personal information has sometimes been possible, UIDAI's infosec has sometimes been lax, and the biometrics captured to create citizens' records have sometimes been used for multiple individuals. Privacy concerns have also been raised over whether biometric data is properly stored and secured, if surveillance of individuals is made possible through Aadhaar, and and possible data mining of the schemes' massive data store.
The fraud industry, in some respects, grew in the first quarter of the year, with crooks putting more human resources into some attacks while increasingly relying on bots to carry out things like credential stuffing and fake account creation.
That's according to Arkose Labs, which claimed in its latest State of Fraud and Account Security report that one in four online accounts created in Q1 2022 were fake and used for fraud, scams, and the like.
The biz, which touts device and network defense software, said it came to this conclusion after analyzing "billions of sessions ... across our global network" during the first three months of the year. These sessions apparently spanned account registrations, logins, and interactions with financial, ecommerce, travel, social media, gaming, and entertainment services. Take all these numbers with a grain of salt as ultimately Arkose wants you to buy its stuff to prevent all this kind of crime.
The US government has recovered over $15 million in proceeds from the 3ve digital advertising fraud operation that cost businesses more than $29 million for ads that were never viewed.
"This forfeiture is the largest international cybercrime recovery in the history of the Eastern District of New York," US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
The action, Peace added, "sends a powerful message to those involved in cyber fraud that there are no boundaries to prosecuting these bad actors and locating their ill-gotten assets wherever they are in the world."
Services giant Infosys has had a difficult week, with one of its flagship projects wobbling and India's government continuing to pressure it over labor practices.
The troublesome project is India's portal for filing Goods and Services Tax returns. According to India's Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), the IT services giant reported a "technical glitch" that meant auto-populated forms weren't ready for taxpayers. The company was directed to fix it and CBIC was faced with extending due dates for tax payments.
China’s Ministry of Public Security has revealed the five most prevalent types of fraud perpetrated online or by phone.
The e-commerce scam known as “brushing” topped the list and accounted for around a third of all internet fraud activity in China. Brushing sees victims lured into making payment for goods that may not be delivered, or are only delivered after buyers are asked to perform several other online tasks that may include downloading dodgy apps and/or establishing e-commerce profiles. Victims can find themselves being asked to pay more than the original price for goods, or denied promised rebates.
Brushing has also seen e-commerce providers send victims small items they never ordered, using profiles victims did not create or control. Dodgy vendors use that tactic to then write themselves glowing product reviews that increase their visibility on marketplace platforms.
Intuit will cough up $141 million in settlement costs and has promised to not make any misleading claims about its supposedly free tax-filing software, prosecutors in the US announced on Wednesday.
Attorneys General Letitia James in New York and Herbert Slatery III 1in Tennessee led efforts to sue Intuit for allegedly scamming taxpayers with false advertising. All 50 US states plus the District of Columbia joined the lawsuit, and accused the tech giant of luring people into using its TurboTax software on the false pretense it would be free.
This legal action followed a probe by ProPublica in Intuit's allegedly unfair trade practices.
The UK's chief finance minister, Rishi Sunak, has blamed legacy IT for his decision not to increase social security payments as inflation hits the highest rate in 30 years.
According to reports, the Conservative politician in charge of The Treasury was prevented from raising some benefits because of aging systems at the country's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which has overall responsibility for social security.
Some benefits were increased by 3.1 percent last month. The chancellor was told he could not introduce further increases because the systems at the benefits agency could not support this, said The Times. A government source said: "The system was simply not built to be flexible."
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