Safeguarding taxpayers from Phishing e-mail by IT Department, Steps taken by Earnings Tax Department for safeguarding taxpayers from Phishing email– regarding. The Income Tax Department has actually been at the forefront of utilizing technology in executing its– e-Governance initiatives. The majority of its regular communication to taxpayers is through email and SMS. The Department is very sensitive and alert to attempts made by fraudsters to spoof the Department’s identity to send out phishing emails. To make sure that taxpayers are aware that the Department does not seek any confidential or monetary information of the taxpayer over email, the listed below mentioned advisory has actually been plainly displayed on the nationwide website:
” The Earnings Tax Department NEVER requests for your PIN numbers, passwords or similar gain access to information for credit cards, banks or other financial accounts through e-mail.
The Income Tax Department interest taxpayers NOT to react to such e-mails and NOT to share info relating to their charge card, bank and other financial accounts.”
The Do’s and Do not’s to ensure that the gullible taxpayers do not accidentally play into the hands of fraudsters are plainly discussed on the website: https://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/report-phishing.aspx All taxpayer reports of phishing e-mails are forwarded to [email protected] which is a Government of India agency mandated to combat against such dangers.
Even More, the Department has implemented best practices such as SPF (Sender Policy Structure), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) for its email domains. Usage of these protocols allows the e-mail receiver domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc to identify whether a gotten e-mail is really from the defined sender such as the Department and obstruct phishing e-mails from reaching the taxpayer.
Taxpayers are encouraged to follow these basic checks if they do get any e-mail claiming to be from the Earnings Tax Department:
- Check for the domain thoroughly. Phony e-mails will have misspelt or incorrect sounding variants of sites of the Earnings Tax Department.
- Inspect the message header– for example in Gmail it can be viewed by choosing the choice ‘Show Original’.
- Do not open such e-mails in spam or scrap folder and do not reply to such e-mails.
- Do not open any attachments. Accessories might include destructive code.
- Do not click on any links. Even if you have clicked on links inadvertently in a suspicious email or phishing website then do not go into confidential information like savings account, credit card details.
- Do not cut and paste the link from the message into your web browsers.
- Forward the phishing emails to [email protected] with a request to examine and obstruct the sender. Usage anti-virus software application, anti spyware, and a firewall software and keep them upgraded.
Income Tax Department is committed to encouraging taxpayers to engage with it electronically by following safe and best practices.