Stephen Condron and Christopher Leake report:
Police are investigating how criminals managed to steal £1million from the taxman by accessing a Government computer system and granting themselves rebates.
The thieves filed returns online using the passwords of genuine self-assessment taxpayers – then diverted the money to bogus accounts.
The sting prompted concern yesterday that the fraudsters may have obtained the passwords from one of the many Whitehall laptops stolen over the past few years.
[…]
The system penetrated by the thieves, the Government Gateway, was set up at a cost of £18million as part of Tony Blair’s vision for services to be administered electronically. It allows users to fill in forms online for anything from paying parking tickets to claiming child tax credit.
The thieves are understood to have diverted the money to bank accounts set up fraudulently using the names of the password holders.
Scotland Yard’s specialist e-crime unit, which arrested a man last week in connection with the case, is investigating whether the fraudsters used sophisticated software to find a weakness in Gateway or whether they targeted the computers of the people whose identities they stole.
Read more in The Mail.