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IRS tool fighting identity theft targeted by cyber-criminals

Tuesday 8 March 2016 11:54 CET | News

One of the Internal Revenue Service’s tools for fighting identity theft has become susceptible to identity thieves.

The agency has suspended a service on its website that allowed past victims of tax-refund identity theft and some others to get personalized identification numbers. Those ID numbers were designed to let the IRS know it was the actual taxpayer filing the return, rather than someone using names and Social Security numbers that had been stolen.

Most taxpayers with identity-theft-protection numbers received their ID via mail. According to the IRS, about 130,000 of the 2.7 million numbers were retrieved online, usually by people who had lost their previously assigned numbers. The IRS offers the identification numbers to victims of identity theft and to people who filed their taxes last year in Florida, Georgia or the District of Columbia.


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Keywords: online fraud, online security, cyber security, fraud prevention, identity theft, IRS, cyber-criminals
Categories: Fraud & Financial Crime
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Countries: World
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Fraud & Financial Crime






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