FAFSA

March 21, 2017

Student Aid Tool Held Key for Tax Fraudsters

This post was originally published on this siteCiting concerns over criminal activity and fraud, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has disabled an automated tool on its Web site that was used to help students and their families apply for federal financial aid. The removal of the tool has created unexpected hurdles for many families hoping to qualify for financial aid, but the action also eliminated a key source of data that fraudsters could use to conduct tax refund fraud. Last week, the IRS and the Department of Education said in a joint statement that they were temporarily shutting down the IRS’s Data Retrieval […]
May 22, 2017

Private Eye Allegedly Used Leaky Goverment Tool in Bid to Find Tax Data on Trump

This post was originally published on this siteIn March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else’s name. This week, it emerged that a Louisiana-based private investigator is being charged with using the same online tool to glean tax data on then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. A story today at Diverseeducation.com points to court filings in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, in […]
November 24, 2017

Name+DOB+SSN=FAFSA Data Gold Mine

This post was originally published on this siteKrebsOnSecurity has sought to call attention to online services which expose sensitive consumer data if the user knows a handful of static details about a person that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground, such as name, date of birth, and Social Security Number. Perhaps the most eye-opening example of this is on display at fafsa.ed.gov, the Web site set up by the U.S. Department of Education for anyone interested in applying for federal student financial aid. Short for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, FAFSA is an extremely lengthy and […]