Scammers pretended to be taxpayers and then took £47 million from 100,000 people’s online accounts, according to HMRC.
According to the tax authorities, it is written to let people know that their accounts have been secured, they haven’t lost any money, and they don’t need to take any action.
“These are attempts to claim money fraudulently from HMRC, not from customers,” HMRC said.
According to HMRC, there has already been a criminal inquiry into the arrests made last year. The scammers allegedly tried to claim rebates after obtaining customer information through phishing tactics.
According to the tax office, this was not a hacking or cyberattack, which has been affecting big-box shops in recent weeks.
“It’s very unacceptable” that a “lot of money” was stolen, HMRC deputy chief executive Angela MacDonald told lawmakers at a Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday.
John-Paul Marks, the chief executive and permanent secretary of HMRC, told the committee that “a lot of work [was] done to intercept this incident.”
According to Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Select Committee, the committee was only made aware of the scheme after it was publicised.
“A word to the wise…let me use my position as chair just to remind you, gently — well, perhaps not so gently — that it would be normal to advise parliament of things if you’re appearing in front of a committee. Not to have it announced during the committee hearing,” she added.
According to Ms. MacDonald, a large portion of the scheme involved thieves creating new accounts using phished data.
She also mentioned that many of the people whose accounts had been created didn’t need online tax accounts and had never used one before, so they wouldn’t have realised they were involved in the scam.
“As we were closing it down, and closing accounts down, the nature of the attack changed throughout the year,” Ms. MacDonald said before the committee.
“They were moving their MO [method ] over… We took a lot of action to actually tackle the perpetrators,” she added.
“What has been a challenge in terms of…. cleaning the accounts update is being clear that we were then cleaning the accounts update is being clear that we were then talking to the genuine customer and not talking to the criminal who was on the other end of the account.”
She claimed to have been “clear with the information commissioner ” and to have followed its guidance for how to handle the situation.
“We are living in an environment where every single organisation is facing some kind of cyber threat,” she said, adding “it is a continuing piece of work for us to invest in our systems….to try to outpace the criminals,.”