There have been two incidents which have reminded me of the danger of online transactions in the last few days:
HMRC spam repayment claim email
A client of mine received an email directing him to a website which as you can see looks pretty realistic at first sight. He was only forewarned by some spelling and grammatical errors in the original email.
To summarise HMRC do not communicate by email and if you are in any doubt ignore it, and at the very least speak to your adviser.
Hacked twitter account
I am usually quite careful of opening links on emails and generally ignore or delete any joke emails that do the rounds. I was however caught out over the weekend when I got a direct message from an old friend asking if I was in “a picture”, as it was someone I trusted I opened the link and the problems started. I then spent quite some time amending passwords and links, aswell as apologising to various people who had spotted it as spam.
The moral of this is to be extremely careful of clicking on any linksonline, make sure you have secure passwords which should be changed frequently, and finally ensure you have an up to date backup preferably on and off site.
This article is based on personal experiences and may not apply to your situation so please seek professional advice before taking any steps based on the information shown. If you would like advice in this or other areas feel free to call. Alastair Wood, AW Accounting, Gravesend – Accountants who “speak your language”