Tax Refund Theft

[Deleted]

I had no idea the problem was so big and lucrative.

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers 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 Service by 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.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified before Congress this month that the I.R.S. detected 940,000 fake returns for 2010 in which identity thieves would have received $6.5 billion in refunds. But Mr. George said the agency missed an additional 1.5 million returns with possibly fraudulent refunds worth more than $5.2 billion.

Postal workers have been harassed, robbed and, in one case, murdered as they have made their rounds with mail trucks full of debit cards and master keys to mailboxes.

Career criminals know easy money when they see it. The police say they run across street corner drug dealers and robbers who have been in and out of prison for years now making lots of money by filing fraudulent returns. Some have been spotted driving Bentleys and Lamborghinis.

“A gentleman, a former armed robber, said: ‘I’m not doing robberies anymore. This is much cleaner. I don’t even have to use a gun,’ ” said Sgt. Jay J. Leiner of the economic crimes unit in the Broward Sheriff’s Office, which has formed a multiagency task force.

www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/us/id-thieves-loot-tax-checks-filing-early-and-often.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

[TheOtherMe]

This is a major reason any return filed with a LARGE refund will be very slow in coming.

[NancysSummerSip]

Aw, of course they would quote someone from a South Florida Sheriff's agency....we have lots of dead people, which means lots of SSN info up for grabs. A sub-species of this scam is the fraud committed using the numbers of the recently deceased. The scammers get the info from the obits in the papers and online, and from there, it's not that hard to get the SS information. They file returns and get money before the estate even knows it's gone. It's one of the reasons I did not run an obit for my mother. I hated to do that, but I did not want her personal information out there (she was due a refund, by the way. Nothing big, but it belongs to the estate.)

[mollyanna58]

It's one of the reasons I did not run an obit for my mother.

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I understand that obits are voluntary, but aren't death notices required for creditors, etc.?

[Cheesy FL-Vol]

It doesn't take very much work online to find the SSN of a deceased person, making this kind of theft extremely easy.

[Peace Of Mind]

That's why I called every single one of the names on mom's Credit Report to report her deceased. I also froze mom's info. by sending certified letters to the Credit Reporting agencies and surrendered her DL to the DVM and had them close it out. I called the 1-800 #'s put fraud alerts at the Credit Reporting agencies and called the social security office and the military to make sure the funeral home reported it. They did.

And even after all of that Wells Fargo sent mom a $50,000 LOC check. When I called to chew them out the stupid girl said "Yes, we have a lot of problems with identity fraud." I said "THAT'S BECAUSE YOU SEND $50,000 CHECKS TO DEAD PEOPLE!!". Had I not put in a change of address God only knows who could have gotten that check.

mollyanna - Yes it's the law but I'm not sure the estate amount. I think it's anything over $6,000 - which mom's was.