Finance

Important SARS fraud warning to taxpayers in South Africa

Staff Writer

 ·10 Oct 2025

The South African Revenue Services (SARS) has issued another alert about a new scam doing the rounds, looking to defraud taxpayers.

The scam follows well-tread phishing patterns, with communications via email parading as official SARS notices.

The communications try to stir panic among taxpayers by presenting as a ‘Settlement Notification’, urging recipients to take action by a set date.

The emails threaten legal action and steep fines and penalties for any taxpayer that does not comply. The notice very closely mimics SARS’ official communication.

It then prompts recipients to open a PDF attachment, coercing taxpayers to make payments to accounts with fraudulent bank details.

This scam represents the latest in a long list of tactics targeting taxpayers and taking advantage of the heightened awareness around tax season.

October is the final month for non-provisional taxpayers to file their tax returns and resolve their tax affairs, with the closing date set at 20 October.

Over the past months, SARS, banks and tax practitioners have noted spikes in fraudulent activity as scammers moved out in full force.

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 outstanding amounts owed to taxpayers
• Notice of outstanding amounts owed to SARS
• Notice of delayed payments pending FICA review
• Alerts of pending or active SARS audits
• Latest: Urgent Settlement Notice

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

SARS urged taxpayers to avoid clicking on any suspect links, attachments, and to be extremely wary when paying money into bank accounts.

It said taxpayers should review how payments are made to SARS, and familiarise themselves with the legitimate methods and processes.

Specifically, users will not be directed to make payments via email, but rather directed to either eFiling/MobiApp or to pay via EFT, with banking details already pre-loaded by the banks.

When making a payment to SARS through eFiling, the system will send a payment request to the taxpayer’s bank which will reflect the amount that needs to be paid on the relevant bank product.

The taxpayer then authorises this request on the relevant bank product. This forms an instruction to the bank to make the payment to SARS.

Payment may be made via the internet banking through EFTs, but taxpayers select the SARS beneficiary from the standard drop-down listing of pre-loaded beneficiary IDs provided by the bank.

All SARS beneficiary IDs are prefixed with the naming convention “SARS- ”.

SARS provided further advice on how to spot and avoid being scammed by criminals:

• 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.
• 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.

To report or to get more information on phishing, please send an email to [email protected].

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