The IRS warns of fraud W-2 emails

  • 9 February 2017
  • 2 replies
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Userlevel 7
  • Retired Webrooter
  • 1376 replies
Phishing scams have become an increasingly popular tactic to try to steal your information.
 
With tax season soon upon us, it's crucial for you and your organization to know that W-2 email scams are ramping up.
 
"Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said last year that phishing is the biggest threat to your cybersecurity. The IRS shares his concern, and they've issued a warning about a new round of tax season attacks that have already claimed 29,000 victims."
 


 
Read the full article by Forbes.

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Userlevel 7
"Phishing attacks have recently been targeting W-2 forms because they are a treasure trove of personal and financial information. The attackers generally pose as a company official or other trusted source when they send phishing emails. In the emails, they either ask HR to send over employees’ W-2 forms or employees to send over their own. Because phishing is a numbers game, the more emails they can send, the higher the chances they’ll get the information they want. So once they have the W-2 forms in hand, there are a variety of ways that criminals choose to exploit them, but lately there has been a rise in the filing of fraudulent tax returns. The goal in these crimes is to illegally collect tax refunds on behalf of other people."
 


Read more on Business 2 Community.
This was more than a year ago, but now I've started to prepare the payrolls and the W-2's from the application I use on the annual basis: https://fillable-form-w2.pdffiller.com/ And now the anti-virus continuing to block it, but I haven't heard of any cases of fraud coming with this website

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