Security News > 2021 > February > ‘Annoyingly Believable’ Tax Scam Targets Mobile Users

A text message-based tax scam is making the rounds in the U.K., in a probable harbinger of things to come as the U.S. tax season gets underway in earnest.

"In this scam, we have to admit that the crooks pulled off a surprisingly believable sequence of web pages - not perfect, but visually believable nevertheless," he said.

The scam begins when a target clicks through to a mobile web page, which is a set of well-designed phishing pages designed to harvest personal data.

The user is shown a decoy page, which is "a believable reason to discourage you from checking up right away with the real HMRC website," Ducklin said.

After a few seconds, this phony page redirects to the official U.K. government tax gateway home page, and the victim's browsing history is deleted, so there's no easy way to look back and see what happened.

"Every month of the year has some sort of tax relevance somewhere in the world, and tax scamming cybercrooks take advantage of the many different regional tax filing seasons to customize their criminality to where you live," Ducklin noted.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/believable-tax-scam-mobile-users/163951/