Coronavirus Payments Are Vulnerable To Fraud

The IRS system for sending out Coronavirus relief payments is vulnerable to fraud, especially with regard to some of the nation's poorest people, according to tax and cybersecurity experts.  Brian Krebs, editor of Krebsonsecurity.com, was among the first to notice that fraudsters could potentially steal these Coronavirus payments with only a few pieces of identifying information.

"I was a little shocked to see that," Krebs told NPR. "There were a number of things that they requested, but very few things that were required. And the only thing that I could tell that were required were name, date of birth, social security number, address — and then you had to have a phone number... That was pretty scary to me."

"There were 390,000 cases that the IRS inspector general found of fraudulent access to that system," Chapple says. "So now fast forward five years and we're using an even weaker system to control access, not just to information, but to payments."  Read the full article here.