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Mar 1, 2018

Are We Sure That Online Filing Is A Good Thing?

     From the Detroit Free Press:
Tim Sagert has been enduring the pain of a double-whammy of identity theft.
First, a crook used his stolen ID to claim Social Security benefits last spring. Then this tax season, Sagert was hit with an SSA-1099 tax form for reporting the income paid to the crook.  ...
The Equifax data breach, first disclosed in September — which some dub as the most destructive data breach recorded —  compromised the personal information of nearly 146 million consumers, including some Social Security data. 
Many consumers wondered  whether someone would open a credit card in their name or file a fake tax return to generate a fraudulent refund using their stolen Social Security numbers.
Few imagined that hackers would try to make bogus claims for Social Security benefits.
But consumers who are in their 60s who have not claimed benefits yet could be at risk for headaches involving fraudulent Social Security retirement claims. ...
Social Security after full retirement age is eligible for up to six months of retroactive benefits, payable in a lump sum. If you accept that lump sum, your monthly benefit is smaller.
For the cyber crooks, the payout is huge if they  use the ID of someone in that age range who isn't already collecting benefits. ...
     I'm going to take a guess that the Social Security Administration would prefer that this not be reported. They wouldn't want their vulnerability to be better known.

5 comments:

  1. And the compensation for this historic data breach? You can get "protection" from Lifelock for a period of time.

    Guess who owns Lifelock?

    Equifax.....

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  2. Yeah, gotta love those commercials about how your information is out there on the dark web. I just scream back at the TV: and you put the info out on the dark web, Equifax!

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  3. Nothing new here this has happened before the data breach. We allowed the SSN to be used as a record tracker years ago, we brought this on ourselves allowing SSNs to be used for other than tax purposes.

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  4. Best way to prevent fraudulent claims is to open a MySsa account and set up security logon. This way the fraudsters can’t set up one for you to file fraudulent claims.

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    Replies
    1. Since iClaim isn’t behind the mySSA portal yet, I don’t think that option would work.

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