LATVIA- The State Revenue Service (SRS) calls on citizens to beware of fraudsters’ text messages and e-mails written as if on behalf of the SRS. The SRS reminds that all information sent by the SRS can be viewed in the Electronic Declaration System (EDS). SRS never sends text messages to residents. On the other hand, in the e-mail, residents only receive notifications about information available in the EDS, and in addition, this notification contains a link to the EDS eds.vid.gov.lv.
Recently, a number of residents who have received e-mails or text messages from fraudsters have contacted the SRS. Fraudsters impersonate the SRS and call for certain actions related to tax refunds. The goal of fraudsters is most likely to obtain people’s bank account access data, so the SRS calls on citizens to be especially careful.
How to recognize that a received message is fraudulent:
- If you receive a text message allegedly from the SRS, then it is fraudulent. SRS never sends text messages to residents.
- If you receive a text message from your bank or any other bank about a tax refund, then it is fraudulent. The SRS pays taxes to the account indicated in the EDS of the citizens, banks do not have to be involved in this process and citizens do not have to perform any additional actions after submitting the annual income declaration.
- If you receive an e-mail inviting you to perform any actions in order to receive a tax refund, or if the links in this e-mail do not lead to the address eds.vid.gov.lv or eds.vid.gov.lv/login/, it is fraudulent . In order to receive a tax refund, citizens must submit an annual income declaration to the EDS and further tax refunds will be made automatically. On the other hand, if the SRS asks, for example, to clarify the declaration, then this should be done only by the EDS. The EDS address is eds.vid.gov.lv. On the other hand, the e-mail notification sent from EDS comes from the addressee “SRS Electronic Declaration System” [email protected]
If you are not sure whether the received message is real, the SRS invites you to contact and ask again by calling the SRS advisory phone number 67120000.
What to do if a person has entered their bank details on a fraudulent website:
- You should contact your bank as soon as possible to block fraudsters’ access to the money and recover what you have lost. The speed of action after an incident is critical to recovering what has been lost.
- The application should be addressed to the State Police.
- If payment card data (not SMART-ID codes) are requested and entered on the scammer’s website, the card itself can be promptly blocked by the user in his Internet bank.
- When receiving fraudulent messages, it is advisable to send them to the Latvian information technology security incident prevention institution CERT.LV at [email protected] in order to protect other citizens from such messages.
On the other hand, in order to protect yourself as much as possible from such fraudsters, CERT.LV invites residents to connect and use the free DNS firewall of CERT.LV and NIC.LV: https://dnsmuris.lv/
CERT.LV has also prepared short explanatory videos on how to recognize various activities of fraudsters on the Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_BxjureTM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIw0oLFzIbw
