Security News > 2021 > February > Identity Theft Spikes Due to COVID-19 Relief

Cases of identity theft in the United States doubled in 2020, mainly due to cybercriminals taking advantage of people affected economically by COVID-19 who filed to receive government benefits.

This is according to the Federal Trade Commission, which received about 1.4 million reports of identity theft last year, according to a blog post published Monday, when the commission kicked off its annual "Identity Theft Awareness Week.".

"Repeatedly, identity thieves targeted government funds earmarked to help people hard hit financially by the pandemic," according to the post by Seena Gressin, an attorney with the Division of Consumer and Business Education at the FTC. In 2020, there were 394,280 reports about government benefits fraud compared with 12,900 reports in 2019.

Cybercriminals also used identity theft to target stimulus checks that the U.S. government paid out to the taxpayers, boosting the number of tax-related cases of this type of cybercrime, according to the FTC. In 2020, the FTC got 89,390 reports of tax-identity theft, compared with 27,450 reports in 2019.

Tax-based identity theft has traditionally been a popular tactic by cybercriminals to pilfer people's yearly tax-return payments; however, in 2020 the numbers of online tax fraud "Began to swell when distribution of the stimulus payments began" according to Gressin.

Hacker forums saw an increase in buying and selling taxpayer data around the time the COVID-19 relief package was announced, alongside the usual phishing and other campaigns typically used to steal annual tax payouts, according to a report released in May. The FTC and its partners are co-hosting a series of free events this week around identity theft to help inform consumers.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/identity-theft-spikes-covid-19-relief/163577/