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The 2016 tax season is now in full swing in the United States, which means scammers are once again assembling vast dossiers of personal data and preparing to file fraudulent tax refund requests on behalf of millions of Americans. But for those lazy identity thieves who can't be bothered to phish or steal the needed data, there is now another option: Buying stolen W-2 tax forms from other crooks who have phished the documents wholesale from corporations.
Pictured in the screenshot above[please see the article] is a cybercriminal shop which sells the usual goods — stolen credit card data, PayPal account logins, and access to hacked computers. But hidden beneath the "other" category of goods for sale by this fraud bazaar is an option I've not previously encountered on these ubiquitous, cookie-cutter stores: A menu item advertising "W-2 2016."
This particular shop — the name of which is being withheld so as not to provide it with free advertising — currently includes raw W-2 tax form data on more than 3,600 Americans, virtually all of whom apparently reside in Florida. The data in each record includes the taxpayer's employer name, employer ID, address, taxpayer address, Social Security number and information about 2016 wages and taxes withheld.
Each W-2 record costs the Bitcoin equivalent of between $4 and $20. W-2 records for employees with higher-than-average wages in the 2016 tax year cost more, ostensibly because thieves stand to reap a higher tax refund from those W-2's if they successfully trick the Internal Revenue Service and/or the states into approving a fraudulent refund in the victim's name.
Tax refund fraud affects hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of U.S. citizens annually. Victims usually first learn of the crime after having their returns rejected because scammers beat them to it. Even those who are not required to file a return can be victims of refund fraud, as can those who are not actually due a refund from the IRS.
Source:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/shopping-for-w2s-tax-data-on-the-dark-web/
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @08:38AM
One thing that has really been getting my goat is the complexity of filling out personal income tax forms.
They no longer even provide forms at the post office or library. Its becoming more and more mandatory that I have professional help in tax preparation.
Geez, I am over 65, retired. No significant income to speak of. Yet government-mandated things like this Covered California Obamacare thing trips off yet more layers of tax forms. So I am supposed to go over to some shop and reveal everything about myself. So far, I have been resisting this, but year by year the forms get more and more blanks and requests for supplemental forms that this whole thing is getting out of hand. Before retiring, I had deliberately not taken several jobs because the tax burdens they would trip off for me took all the incentive away. Single. No dependents. For me - full tax burden. Best not to do anything than get involved with someone whose going to trip off a tax nightmare for me.
Many years ago, I used TurboTax, but that came to a screeching halt when they started playing all sorts of games with me to coerce me to their business models. I fell back to the old Visicalc thing under DOS. I try to keep things simple as possible, and still end up having to pay extra postage to mail the paper forms back... so many of 'em.
I feel forcing us to go to others and reveal our innermost financial records to complete strangers can't end up well. Especially these fly-by-night operations that blossom once a year to capitalize on our Government's mandate that all of us file.
If I used veiled threats to tell others to obey my requests to spend several hours/days at my demand, or I will use whatever force it took to get you to do so, including discharge of firearms if need be, would I be considered a menace to society?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @01:40PM
One could argue that the complexity of the federal tax filing process is because the tax preparation companies are in bed with the government.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday February 10 2017, @02:07AM
I thought it was already well known that the tax preparation industry lobbies heavily against efforts to simplify the income tax. While I don't hate the tax preperation industry as much as, say, health insurance companies, they are basically another multi-billion dollar industry that really shouldn't even exist and is nothing but a drain on the economy.
I do my taxes on my own. The Federal government has their "free fillable forms" that lets me fill out my taxes and e-file for free. Actually works fairly well, though I'm pretty sure the site uses Flash so it might be a bit more interesting this year now that I've uninstalled Flash. However, at the state level, you can only e-file through one of their approved vendors. Most of them you have to pay for, while others are "free" for varying degrees of free. All of them (as far as I can tell) won't let you file just your state taxes - they also want you to file your federal taxes through them too. So every year I fill out the paper forms and mail it in, only to later listen to the yearly news story about how the state is perplexed at the number of people who still file on paper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:16PM
I 've used jGnash for record keeping and Libreoffice Calc to do my taxes for the last few years. Haven't used Turbotax in decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:26PM
I wonder if this would prove useful? https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/ [sourceforge.net]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @01:14AM
You can get the IRS to send you any tax form on paper for free here:
https://www.irs.gov/uac/forms-and-publications-by-u-s-mail [irs.gov]
May states have a similar web order form for paper tax forms and instructions.