Tax Refund Fraud

March 6, 2016

Seagate Phish Exposes All Employee W-2’s

This post was originally published on this site Email scam artists last week tricked an employee at data storage giant Seagate Technology into giving away W-2 tax documents on all current and past employees, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. W-2 forms contain employee Social Security numbers, salaries and other personal data, and are highly prized by thieves involved in filing phony tax refund requests with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the states. Seagate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Image: Wikipedia According to Seagate, the scam struck on March 1, about a week after KrebsOnSecurity warned readers to be on the lookout for email […]
March 7, 2016

IRS Suspends Insecure ‘Get IP PIN’ Feature

This post was originally published on this site Citing ongoing security concerns, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has suspended a service offered via its Web site that allowed taxpayers to retrieve so-called IP Protection PINs (IP PINs), codes that the IRS has mailed to some 2.7 million taxpayers to help prevent those individuals from becoming victims of tax refund fraud two years in a row. The move comes just days after KrebsOnSecurity first exposed how ID thieves were abusing the service to revisit tax refund on innocent taxpayers two years running. Last week, this blog told the story of Becky Wittrock, […]
March 16, 2016

Thieves Phish Moneytree Employee Tax Data

This post was originally published on this site Payday lending firm Moneytree is the latest company to alert current and former employees that their tax data — including Social Security numbers, salary and address information — was accidentally handed over directly to scam artists. Seattle-based Moneytree sent an email to employees on March 4 stating that “one of our team members fell victim to a phishing scam and revealed payroll information to an external source.” “Moneytree was apparently targeted by a scam in which the scammer impersonated me and asked for an emailed copy of certain information about the Company’s […]
March 24, 2016

Phishing Victims Muddle Tax Fraud Fight

This post was originally published on this site Many U.S. citizens are bound to experience delays in getting their tax returns processed this year, thanks largely to more stringent controls enacted by Uncle Sam and the states to block fraudulent tax refund requests filed by identity thieves. A steady drip of corporate data breaches involving phished employee W-2 information is adding to the backlog, as is an apparent mass adoption by ID thieves of professional tax services for processing large numbers of phony refund requests. According to data released this week by anti-fraud company iovation, the Internal Revenue Service is taking up to […]