I’m assuming you’re not one of nature’s money launderers, and all your financial dealings are honest ones. How then would you avoid clandestine attempts to turn you into a launderer of stolen cash?

Here’s one solution : reject all emails that ask you to help with transferring a large sum of money from one place to another, neither of which you have any connection with.

We’ve all received them : our inbox pings and we find an URGENT MESSAGE (they’re often in capital letters), from Mr Winston Churchill Obongo, President of Barclays Bank, Nigeria, who pleads for our help in transferring a $10m inheritance to a destitute widow in the USA/UK, or wherever we happen to live.

We delete them, of course. Only the most credulous or ill-informed people on the planet would fall for such a crude ploy.

Now, however, something more insidiously believable is doing the rounds. It pretends to come from the genuine clothing company, Harvey’s of Oldham, England. Its sender calls himself, Ronald Harvey. He says his company moves money around the world, but falls foul of a 25 percent “international money transfer tax” on businesses. Individuals, apparently only pay 7 percent.

You can see where this is going. You are the key to reducing Harvey’s costs by 18 percent. All you have to do is accept funds into your bank and use a money transfer firm to send it on around the world. You receive 10 percent.

You may, of course, wonder why you’ve been singled out, but the lure of 10 percent of whatever millions are shooting through, is a persuasive one. The snag is that in Britain banks by law demand to know where any sum over £10,000 has come from. Nevertheless, a regular transfer of £9,900 would get through the cracks.

The bottom line is that the money transfer tax doesn’t exist and the money will be stolen. By getting into the loop you’ll be rendering it squeaky clean for the recipient.

Ronald Harvey turns out to be “Michael” with a distinctive African accent. The scam has nothing to do with the Oldham workwear firm.

It’s emerging that the British tax authority Revenue & Customs believes tens of thousands of buy-to-let landlords are error-prone in their tax returns. So much so that reports have suggested a crackdown by the Revenue.

However, a spokesman responds, “The idea that we’re dragging in hordes of buy-to-let investors to face some medieval inquisition is just so wide of the mark.” They are, he said, worried that many people are confused about the tax regime, and up to 80,000 may be paying the wrong amount.

Letting property carries a much more complex tax calculation than the normal buying and selling of houses. In many cases it may be that investors are not claiming all their allowances and therefore overpaying.

There is a long list of expenses that can be claimed against rental income. The most obvious one is interest on any mortgages used to buy the property. Capital repayments, however, are not covered by this.

Landlords can also claim 10 percent of annual rental for “wear and tear”, effectively depreciation of furnishings, fittings and the fabric of the house. Insurance is also deductible, as are fees paid to managing agents. Legal and accounting fees are included too.

If you sell the property you must pay 40 percent capital gains on the profit, unlike your main residence which is exempt. However, the first £9,200 of profits in any year are free from tax.

If you have owned the property for more than three years, you can save 40 percent on CGT, and there’s further relief if you have lived in the property. One ploy used by canny landlords is to let their own house for six months, while living themselves in a rental property due for sale, thus eliminating CGT altogether.

As with any relationship with the Revenue, it pays to be on top of the detail.

If you thought you could make money online without declaring it to the taxman, think again.

Austria, Denmark, Britain, Canada, The Netherlands and Sweden have teamed up for the “Xenon” program, which was started in The Netherlands in 2004 by the Dutch equivalent of the IRS, Belastingdienst.

Wired Digital reports, “Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered — something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages.”

The program aims to crack down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.

Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon’s Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.

Canada’s tax authorities declined to state what its Xenon data retention policies are, as did Simon Bird, head of the “Web Robot Team” at the British HM Revenue and Customs office.

In the United States, the IRS is not a part of the Xenon project, but would neither confirm nor deny that it uses spidering software in its investigations.