FTC: Tax Fraud Behind 47% Spike in ID Theft
Summary: The FTC recorded more than 490,000 identity theft complaints in 2015, a 47 percent increase over 2014, and Chairwoman Edith Ramirez called tax refund fraud the largest and fastest growing category the commission tracks. The announcement came with a rebuilt identitytheft.gov that generates personalized recovery plans, leaves Social Security and driver's license fields blank for consumers to fill in by hand, and requires multi-factor authentication to receive a plan.
Bottom line: The IRS mailed roughly 2.7 million Identity Protection PINs to tax ID theft victims, but lets recipients retrieve those PINs online by answering knowledge-based questions that Krebs says can be guessed or found on Zillow and Facebook - so the control meant to stop a repeat fraud depends on data that is no longer secret.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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