Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what action they are taking to combat tax refund scams.

The most common form of tax refund scam involves criminals abusing HMRC’s brand by trying to make it look like an email or text has come from HMRC. HMRC has dedicated Customer Protection teams within their Cyber Security Command Centres to combat Phishing (email) and SMiShing (texting) attacks, including those offering spurious tax refunds. They use a range of proactive and reactive techniques to identify and challenge online scams in order to reduce harm to the public.

In the last year, the teams above have identified over 14,000 malicious HMRC-related websites and requested their removal. HMRC also challenge the ownership of misleading sites through formal internet dispute resolution governance. That work has resulted in over 2 million visits to potentially misleading sites being redirected to gov.uk education pages.

HMRC works closely with other government departments and with industry to continue to develop controls to combat tax refund scams.