Last month millions were stolen from HMRC using phishing attacks.
Arrests have been made in Romania phishing attacks against HMRC.
According to media reports, 13 people were arrested after stolen data was used to fraudulently obtain millions of pounds of tax payments.
Police also seized cash and luxury cars during the raids against the individuals aged between 23 and 53, and arrested on suspicion of computer fraud, money laundering and illegal access to a computer system.
A 14th person, a 38-year-old man, was arrested in Preston, northwest England, earlier on Thursday, HMRC said, while two other men had been arrested in Bucharest in November on suspicion of cybercrime and fraud.
Phishing-Enabled Theft
The raids follow HMRC's revelation last month that a criminal gang had stolen £47 million by using phishing tactics to access more than 100,000 customer accounts and falsely claiming payments from the government.
HMRC had said last month the incident was an attempt to take money from the tax office, and not customers, although the authority had written to about 100,000 affected people.
"We have already acted to protect customers after identifying attempts to access a very small minority of tax accounts," Simon Grunwell, operational lead in HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service, said.
William Wright, CEO of Closed Door Security, said: “Tax scams are one of the biggest risks to citizens in the UK as criminals are adopting tactics to make them highly convincing, often using a mix of emails, post and SMS to send out fraudulent comms.
“The correspondence often looks genuine and it takes a very savvy consumer to question its authenticity, especially as criminals often hijack on key tax dates, such as the self-assessment deadline in January.”
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
