IRS: Crooks Stole Data on 100K Taxpayers Via ‘Get Transcript’ Feature
Summary: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen acknowledged that identity thieves used the agency's 'Get Transcript' feature to pull sensitive data on more than 100,000 taxpayers, with the IRS saying about 200,000 attempts came from questionable email domains between February and mid-May 2015 and that more than 100,000 cleared authentication. The service was temporarily shut down, and the IRS estimates thieves used the data to steal up to $50 million in fraudulent refunds, while Utah State Tax Commission chair John Valentine reported a tenfold increase in suspicious refund filings tied to prior-year return data.
Why it matters: More than 100,000 successful authentications against a government transcript system produced an estimated $50 million in fraudulent refunds, and the GAO puts overall state and federal tax refund fraud losses near $6 billion last year.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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