UK taxpayers have been targeted by over 1.5 million email scams, calls and text messages over the past two years purporting to be from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

Data collated by Griffin Law showed that while text-based scams, known as ‘smishing’, rose by 56 per cent between 2018 and 2019 - from 36,950 to 57,579 - email scams, known as phishing, declined 60 per cent, from 841,805 to 333,857.

Meanwhile, phone-based scams tripled from 58,538 in 2018 to 195,720 last year.

HMRC scams have become increasingly aggressive and threatening, with police issuing multiple warnings about those that include false threats of arrest.

Corin Imai, senior security advisor at DomainTools, said that despite numerous initiatives to raise awareness on HMRC scams, the fact they continue to proliferate indicates that these campaigns remain profitable for the attackers who devise them.

“However, the surge in phone-based and text message scams and the decline in phishing emails denotes that the efforts to warn potential victims of the threats coming through their inbox have been at least somewhat successful: cyber criminals only stop exploiting a certain technique only when it ceases to be effective.

“British people should be reminded that HMRC only gets in touch via regular mail, and any other type of interaction is most certainly a fraud.”

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