Identity Theft

Identity thieves often target children for many reasons: First, children haven’t had a chance to damage their credit yet, so the clean slate of a child’s blank credit history can be appealing to someone who may have trashed theirs. Additionally, because kids shouldn’t have a credit history yet, few parents or guardians are checking to see if credit has been fraudulently opened in the child’s name, which allows thieves to go about their business unnoticed. There are various estimates of child identity theft that say there are hundreds of thousands of child identity theft victims reported each year. If it were impossible to open credit accounts using the Social Security number of someone who is younger than 18 years old, perhaps child identity theft

Identity thieves used the IRS’ own systems to steal personal information from about 100,000 taxpayers, the agency said on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. Criminals already armed with some data on the taxpayers used the IRS “Get Transcript” website to obtain even more data on their victims, the IRS said. Get Transcript gives taxpayers the ability to obtain tax returns from previous years. Visitors to the Get Transcript page at the IRS on Tuesday afternoon were greeted by the message: “Alert: The online Get Transcript service is currently unavailable. Transcripts may still be ordered using the Get Transcript by Mail service. We apologize for any inconvenience.” The IRS said criminals had accessed the site from February through mid-May, and that it was shut