Tax refund fraud affects hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of U.S. citizens annually. It starts when crooks submit your personal data to the IRS and claim a refund in your name, but have the money sent to an account or address you don’t control. 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. The IRS’s preferred method of protecting tax refund victims from getting hit two years in a row – the Identity Protection (IP) PIN – has already been mailed to some 2.7 million tax ID theft victims. The six-digit PIN must be supplied on the following year’s tax application before the IRS will accept the return as valid.
