Young adults who may have less experience of the tax system should be especially vigilant against springtime refund scams, warns HM Revenue and Customs.

Scammers are increasingly targeting vulnerable or elderly people and those with less familiarity with the tax system, such as young adults.

During April and May, fraudsters regularly blitz taxpayers with refund scams by email or text pretending to be HMRC. Criminals do this to coincide with legitimate rebates being processed by HMRC.

They will encourage people to provide bank details, in exchange for a payment worth hundreds of pounds, on a fake government website to harvest private information and steal money. HMRC will never ask someone to provide bank details by text or email.

Last spring alone, HMRC received around 250,000 reports of tax scams — which is nearly 2,500 a day — and requested that over 6,000 phishing websites be deactivated.

Head of customer services at HMRC, Angela MacDonald, said: “We are determined to protect honest people from these fraudsters who will stop at nothing to make their phishing scams appear legitimate.

“HMRC is currently shutting down hundreds of phishing sites a month. If you receive one of these emails or texts, don’t respond and report it to HMRC so that more online criminals are stopped in their tracks.”

See this week’s south papers for the full story, available in shops and as a digital edition on Wednesday