SARS has reported a rise in eFiling profile hijacking, involving various methods such as altering security details, creating, or modifying taxpayer profiles, and executing SIM swaps.
The hijackers’ objectives are to redirect tax refunds to fraudulent bank accounts, which they are setting up for this purpose. There are certain banks which appear to feature more frequently.
If you are the victim of such profile hacking, you must immediately report this fraud via the SARS Online Query System. SARS has established a new Digital Fraud team to manage such cases from start to finish.
If you report this fraud, SARS will put a stopper on your eFiling profile to prevent any tax refunds from being paid to you until the case of profile hacking has been fully resolved.
They have recently implemented additional security measures to address identified gaps, which has already resulted in a significant reduction in reported cases of fraud. They are also collaborating with financial institutions to further bolster controls.
Security measures to put in place:
*TaxTim will request you to de-activate two-factor authentication on your eFiling profile when we try to connect to it. Please follow these instructions, because we cannot connect to your eFiling profile while you have two-factor authentication enabled. However, please re-activate it as soon as TaxTim has confirmed that we have obtained shared access to your eFiling profile.
What to do if your eFiling profile is hacked:
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