A former D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) employee who provided 645 youth offenders’ identity information to a tax refund fraud ring was sentenced today. Marc A. Bell pleaded guilty in January for his role in the scheme that filed more than 12,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking at least $42 million in refunds. According to the Department…
Category: ID Theft
Two more colleges report compromise of employee W-2 info
Two more colleges have reported breaches involving employee W-2 data. I’m late picking the first one up, but it seems Allegheny College employees reported problems when filing taxes. On April 14, Angela Mauroni reported that at least 74 non-student employees of the Pennsylvania college had reported such problems. The college believes the information was accessed through the hacking…
MI: Former doctor’s office clerk sentenced for stealing patients’ identities
WZZM reports: A former doctor’s office billing clerk will spend time in prison for writing checks and applying for credit cards using information stolen from patients. Christine Ann Kroeze will spend between 4.5 and 14 years in prison on six felony convictions. Read more on WZZM. The accompanying video focuses on a sign that…
NY: Tax refund fraud reported by Stony Point employees under investigation
It looks like employees of yet another town may have become victims of tax refund fraud, and the town is trying to determine the cause. This time, the report comes from Stony Point, New York, where 30 current and former employees have reported that when they attempted to file their tax returns, they discovered that…
Grand Sierra Resort guest payment cards breached in 2014 and again in 2015
The Grand Sierra Resort in Reno, Nevada, has become the latest hospitality entity to disclose a data breach involving customers’ credit card information. In this case, there appear to be two time frames during which cards used at their food and retail locations may have been compromised: for a one-month period in 2014 and again…
Meanwhile, back at the phishing for W-2 department…
After 24 days of updating my scratch list of incidents involving phishing for W-2 information (business email compromise), I decided to take stock and try to organize what we have so far. I was surprised to see that there were already 90 incidents (make that 126 as of May 18th). Most of these entries were found…