> Aside, anyone have an insight into how do you suddenly get a "tax bill" from the Austrian government for 15k Euro?
Extra income from contracts and failed to set aside enough? I've had big tax bills before, it's not that unusual, and I'd get the temptation of dipping into money set aside if subsequent income has been lower than expected. But tax authorities do tend to be flexible about repayment plans most places. Maybe that's not true for Austria.
The bigger issue there for me, though, is that a scammer is not going to hesitate to fake a tax bill. Why the bank think that would prove anything suggests to me they haven't thought this through very well either.
No, nowadays many official documents come with a URL (often in the form of a QR code) linking to a digital copy of the document stored on a governmental server.
I have literally never seen this. I don't doubt it can happen, but for that to work it'd rely on the fraud team to 1) know exactly what a letter from the Austrian tax office should look like to notice if there isn't a URL if those letters do have one, 2) if the scammers were to include one, it'd require them to be certain enough about the URL that pointing it to a suitable fake one would be insufficient.
I'm not convinced the fraud team wouldn't be easily fooled, in other words.
Not that I'd want to try; but for someone already breaking the law there's little reason not to.
You're trying to tell me you genuinely believe they'd find and hire a consultant in Austria to assess the authenticity of a document? Where would they seek out someone for this hypothetical task there's no way they'd actually bother with?
Extra income from contracts and failed to set aside enough? I've had big tax bills before, it's not that unusual, and I'd get the temptation of dipping into money set aside if subsequent income has been lower than expected. But tax authorities do tend to be flexible about repayment plans most places. Maybe that's not true for Austria.
The bigger issue there for me, though, is that a scammer is not going to hesitate to fake a tax bill. Why the bank think that would prove anything suggests to me they haven't thought this through very well either.