File Your Taxes Before the Fraudsters Do
Summary: The 2014 tax filing season opened on Jan. 31, and a 2013 Treasury Inspector General report found the IRS issued nearly $4 billion in bogus refunds in 2012, largely to thieves who filed returns on stolen Social Security numbers at a different address. Cybercrime shops sell "fullz" - name, address, phone, date of birth and Social Security number - and one such service offered data on more than 13,000 U.S. citizens, while the earlier Superget.info service sold data on hundreds of thousands of Americans and bought it from a company later purchased by Experian.
Key Takeaway: Nearly $4 billion in fraudulent refunds went out in a single year, and the underground supply of fullz records scales from 13,000 people at one shop to hundreds of thousands at another - a volume that outpaces any individual's ability to monitor their own return.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Identity & Access Management
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