SARS warns of new scam targeting businesses

 ·3 Oct 2024

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has warned of the latest scam doing the rounds, using legitimate SARS employee names to direct taxpayers to dodgy sites.

The revenue service warned that the impersonating scams is specifically targeting businesses, while individual taxpayers could also get caught in the fraud.

“The emails contain an attachment with a link where one can ‘settle an outstanding balance or debt’. A real SARS employee’s name and contact details appear on the email signature, but if you look closely, the email domain is different,” it said.

This is the latest in a string of scams that have emerged during tax season 2024.

This tax season, fraudulent messages and emails have been doing the rounds as part of typical phishing attempts, but they have been trying to get one over taxpayers by focusing on new topics.

The latest scams join these others:

  • Threats of SARS issuing court summonses against taxpayers
  • Threats of SARS blacklisting taxpayers
  • Threats of SARS issuing stop orders on accounts
  • Notice of correspondence relating to solar
  • Notice of outstanding amounts owed to taxpayers
  • Notice of outstanding amounts owed to SARS
  • Notice of delayed payments pending FICA review
  • Legitimate SARS employee impersonation

Examples of these scams and more can be seen on SARS’ scams page.

SARS has previously noted that if taxpayers are unsure about the legitimacy of an email purporting to come from the taxman, they should be sent on to [email protected].

To best protect themselves from such scams, SARS noted that taxpayers should be aware of the following:

  • Do not open or respond to emails from unknown sources.
  • Beware of emails that ask for personal, tax, banking and eFiling details (login credentials, passwords, pins, credit/debit card information, etc.).
  • SARS will never request your banking details in any communication you receive via post, email, or SMS. However, for the purpose of telephonic engagement and authentication, SARS will verify your personal details. Importantly, SARS will not send you hyperlinks to other websites—even those of banks.
  • Beware of false SMSes.
  • SARS does not send *.htm or *.html attachments.
  • SARS will never ask for your credit card details.

Tax season closing soon

Taxpayers have also been reminded that the filing season for 2024 will be coming to an end soon, with under three weeks remaining.

Tax season for individual taxpayers will be closing on 21 October 2024.

The window for provisional taxpayers and trusts—the latter of which opened in mid-September—will still be open until 20 January 2025.

Tax Season 2024Start dateEnd date
Auto-assessments1 July 202414 July 2024
Individual Taxpayers (Non-Provisional)15 July 202421 October 2024
Provisional Taxpayers15 July 202420 January 2025
Trusts16 September 202420 January 2025

Read: SARS is coming after these taxpayers hard

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