Income tax department time and again ensure that taxpayers are aware that the Department does not seek any confidential or financial information of the taxpayer over email, or phone call.

Most of its routine communication to taxpayers is through email and SMS but never asks for your PIN numbers, passwords or similar access information for credit cards, banks or other financial accounts through e-mail.

Taxpayers should not respond to such e-mails and should not share information relating to their credit card, bank and other financial accounts.

Taxpayers are advised to follow these simple checks if they do receive any email purporting to be from the Income Tax Department:

• Check for the domain name carefully. Fake emails will have misspelt or incorrect sounding variants of websites of the Income Tax Department.
• Check the message header - for example in Gmail it can be viewed by selecting the option 'Show Original'.
• Do not open such emails in spam or junk folder and do not reply to such emails.
• Do not open any attachments. Attachments may contain malicious code.
• Do not click on any links. Even if you have clicked on links inadvertently in a suspicious e-mail or phishing website then do not enter confidential information like bank account, credit card details.
• Do not cut and paste the link from the message into your browsers.
• Forward the phishing emails to incident@cert-in.org.inincident@cert-in.org.in with a request to examine and block the sender.
• Use anti-virus software, anti spyware, and a firewall and keep them updated.

Goodreturns.in