Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

tsu doh nimh writes If you're an American and haven't yet created an account at irs.gov, you may want to take care of that before tax fraudsters create an account in your name and steal your personal and tax data in the process. Brian Krebs shows how easy it is for scammers to register an account in your name and view your current and past W2s and tax filings with the IRS, and tells the story of a New York man who — after receiving notice from the agency that someone had filed a phony return in his name — tried to get a copy of his transcript and found someone had already registered his SSN to an email address that wasn't his. Apparently, having a credit freeze prevents thieves from doing this, because the IRS relies on easily-guessed knowledge-based authentication questions from Equifax.

Comments

Re:Sign up?

[mellon]

Request a transcript, like the author of the article did. However, bear in mind that if you register for an account, now all a fraudster needs to get into your irs.gov account is pwnership of your computer, which may be even easier to get than the personal information required to sign up.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Firethorn]

Yeah, but to go along with the original AC's premise about abolishing the IRS, I have to tell those that want to 'get rid of the IRS' that you'd need the IRS even under there scheme. As long as the government is collecting taxes, it needs to have a department collecting them.

Department of War, Department of Defense, same difference. Ditto with whatever you 'replace' the IRS with.

Re:Sign up?

[TechyImmigrant]

I did. That's how I found the place to sign up.

I signed up.

It gave password rules and validated the password on the fly with four green ticks, one against each rule (> 8 chars, special chars etc.). I used a 32 character password generated from my password manager.

The web page then errors out each time I tried to enter the password, saying it needed a valid password, even though the password was declared valid each time. In the end I got it to work when I reduced the password length below 20 characters. This may be due to the length, or some other difference, since my password manager was creating a different password each time I fiddled with the generator rules.

The whole thing sticks of basic programming incompetence.

 

Re:they don't make it easy

[roc97007]

Sorry. 4 bits. 1/16. 6.25%

Which is still a *lot* of successes. Probably a better return on average than the "We are from The Microsoft and we are calling you because your computer is infested with the viruses" scam.