Australians warned to be vigilant as a third of people fall for tax time scams

When Katherine Stavitt received a text message from the Australian Tax Office about her son's refund, she thought it was a scam. Your ITO portal has been accessed and there's been several changes made to your personal details. Is this correct? The former bookkeeper manages her son Chris's accounts while he works overseas and called the tax office. What she discovered was shocking. Someone had lodged a tax return on Christopher's behalf. And if I hadn't responded within two days? They're going to release up to an amount of $7000. Here's how the scam works and what happened to Chris. Thieves hacked his Mygov account, then lodged a fake tax return. They also changed his e-mail and home address and set up new bank accounts using his information so that they would receive his $7000 tax refund. And that's often the the detection point for many Australians that are caught up in these types of scams. Cyber specialist David Lacey says around 80% of victims. Have no idea how hackers gain access to their mygov accounts and steal their identities. We've had around 3000 cases so far this calendar year. As the scams get more sophisticated, even the Ato admits they're struggling to keep across them all this year so far, we've had seven and a half thousand reports of different scams to the Ato, so that's about 45 a day. The best way to protect yourself from this tax return scam is to call the Ato if you get a text message from them and have more than one phone number for them to reach you on. Fortunately, that worked for Catherine and Chris. But more than a year later, they're still locked out of his account. So I thought that the Ato would have been the last to ever get hacked. They've got to seriously look at at their security. Michelle Tapper, 9 News.