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Malicious Actors Targeting Tax Fraud In Your Name
Tax season is often a stressful time for people around the country. Unfortunately, bad actors don't rest and will even look to take advantage of your tax returns by fraudulently submitting for refunds on your behalf.
This can be particularly annoying, since they could be able to do this without anything on your behalf. Due to the sheer amount of data breaches, at this point most people have their personal information online somewhere where a bad actor could purchase it - meaning it's not a scheme that even requires you to have done something wrong yourself for them to potentially target you. The hope of these bad actors is to submit for a fraudulent return and hope you don't notice and they can collect them money themselves without your noticing.
Originally created to help victims of identify theft, the IRS has begun allowing all filers to request an identity protection PIN. This is a one-time code that is assigned to an individual through their ID.me account and would be required for the submission this tax season. That means anything submitted without that code is viewed as a fraudulent claim/not you and ignored.
This pin can be requested for future years, too, but the pin will change each year so that no one can get it from an information leak of some kind and then attempt to use it the following tax cycle.
It's just another security option for users to consider this time of year.
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