HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has averted over a million visits to deceptive websites, including those which promote misleading and costly helpline numbers, it’s announced.
When someone searches online for HMRC’s phone numbers or digital services they can be directed to other websites. Some of these promote premium rate, non-HMRC numbers as a means of reaching the department. These are in fact call forwarding services which connect callers to HMRC, but at a price, despite HMRC’s own 0300 numbers being free or charged at the national landline rate. In other cases, sites charge for forwarding information to HMRC which can be provided free, through GOV.UK. Too often this is an attempt to mislead customers and gain business at their expense, without making clear the service is not affiliated with HMRC, the taxman points out.
Since January, HMRC’s cyber security team has taken control of over 75 of these dubious sites by challenging their ownership. Any members of the public trying to access these sites will now be redirected to HMRC’s GOV.UK pages, which provide HMRC’s genuine contact numbers as well as advice on how to spot these misleading sites. Through this work, HMRC has redirected over a million customers to GOV.UK, averting a potential one million visits to malicious or misleading websites.
HMRC’s Director for Customer Services, Angela MacDonald, said: “HMRC takes the abuse of its brand very seriously. Attempts to dupe customers in this way won’t be tolerated and we will always act to protect the public from malicious or misleading websites.”
HMRC is also combating other types of scams that customers are being targeted by. This includes requesting the removal of over 20,000 malicious websites in the last year.
Details on how to spot these scams at https://www.gov.uk/report-suspicious-emails-websites-phishing; and you can report a misleading website, email or phone number to Action Fraud. Or forward suspicious emails to HMRC at [email protected].
