ID Thieves Loot Tax Checks, Filing Early and Often

[Casino67]

NYTimes.com:

MIAMI — Besieged by identity theft, Florida now faces a fast-spreading form of fraud so simple and lucrative that some violent criminals have traded their guns for laptops. And the target is the United States Treasury.

 

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Securitynumbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.

 

 

The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Serviceby filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files. Then the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card.