The tax office is urging Australians to be on the lookout for scammers with more than 10,000 reports of fraud attempts every month since the beginning of the financial year.

The scams take the form of a phone, email or text message, supposedly from the ATO which then attempts to convince the recipient to click on links, or reveal personal information and financial details.

In the video above: Sick of being targeted, a victim turns the tables

Others tell the recipient they owe money and seek to recover it through bank transfers.

The latest scam takes a very different approach.

Latest scam

It is an email attempt formatted to look like an official Australian Taxation Office which suggests the recipient has not been given the full tax refund to which they are entitled.

It tells the recipient they are entitled to a manual review to see how much extra cash they are due - as long as they click on the link below.

Even the sender email address is dummied up to look like an official ATO address.

"Scammers are particularly active during tax time because of the large number of people lodging their tax return and receiving notices of assessment or other contact, and refunds from the ATO," an ATO spokesperson told 7NEWS.com.au.

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The spokesperson said that in the first three months of this financial year - known as "tax time" to the office - the ATO received 33,864 reports of ATO impersonation scams.

Worse yet, the crooks convinced 144 people to hand over $535,140.

On the rise

"Over the past year, we have seen an increased number of reports of scammers contacting members of the public pretending to be from the ATO," the spokesperson said.

"We see ATO impersonation scams by phone, email and SMS and their tactics are increasing in sophistication."

The spokesperson said the ATO never sends email or text messages with hyperlinks directing people to log-on pages or forms to collect financial information.

And taxpayers should only access online services through the official government app or website and never through a hyperlink, and activate multifactor identification for increased security.

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