I too had a voice mail along these lines, sounded like a recorded message from "John Matthews" but in the message they said they were from the "Australian Taxations Office" (note the plural) which a genuine ATO staff person would never have gotten wrong.

Same scenario as others. Unclear, non specific message left on answering service directing me to contact "John Matthews" on the specified number. Just ignored it, but thought I would check up number to find out if there had been any others hit with this.

Yes - I had a John Matthews as well - left a message purporting to be from the ATO - clearly a scam

John Mathews (with a very heavy Indian?) from ATO called , left a message asking me to return his call urgently and not to ignore this message. When returned his call then next day I spoke to several people all with strangely heavy Asian/Indian accents a David Marshall and a Kevin Lloyd. I apparently I owed $9786.00 after an audit of my taxes from 2001-2006 and unless I cooperated fully I would be arrested within a couple of hours and the matter would be take to court. I strung them along , and kept asking to be transferred to someone I understand as I have a hearing problem.

They were very insistant and were very good at quoting legal acts and kept reminding me the call was being monitored and taped etc.... had me going for a while but they started to stuff up and call me the wrong name even after told them I wasn't a Mrs only a Ms... and then when I asked them to tell me my tax file number they couldn't/wouldn't.... I then terminated the call and rang the 13 oo oo number for the ATO and checked it out. someone at work told me about this site

please be careful

Caller "John Matthews" purporting to be from the Australian Taxations Office reckoning that there's tax evasion going on and there's a petition from the Commonwealth Public Prosecutions. I rang the ATO and told them someone's pretending to be them, and they said this was the second "John Matthews" of the ATO report they'd had today and they'd had several this week.