Here’s what you need to know about tax season scams

Tax refunds are often a financial boost for Americans, but they’ve increasingly become the target of scammers who can use your identity to recover whatever money is owed by Uncle Sam.

Last year, the IRS received 294,138 complaints of reported identity theft, the second most in its history. The most was 328,591 in 2021, which reflects the massive surge of cybercrime that spiked in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In order to process your tax return, the IRS asks for some personal information to verify your identity, including your home address and Social Security number. In an ideal world, no malicious actors would have that information. Unfortunately, there are more data breaches almost every year, and the online cybercrime ecosystem is rife with criminals who trade and sell Americans’ data.

While the Internal Revenue Service is getting better at stopping tax identity theft with its own internal filters, you’re much more likely to avoid becoming a victim if you take some security precautions into your own hands. That means filing your taxes quickly, signing up for the IRS IP PIN program and staying vigilant to avoid falling for scammers who falsely claim to work for the agency.

That means you should assume scammers who want to file a false tax return in your name already have all the information they need to do so, said Eva Velasquez, the CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps victims of identity theft.

“With the state of data breaches, we should all be operating under the assumption that all the data necessary to file a fraudulent tax return in your name is out there,” Velasquez says.

Stop tax ID theft before it starts

Many victims only learn they’ve been scammed when they go to file their