Identity Theft and Your Tax Returns

Thieves continue to get more and more creative with personal information. Computerworld reports that so far 155 medical students from the University of California at Irvine have experienced fraud from identity theft.

The criminals used their personal information to file fraudulent tax returns and then collect the tax refunds.

(Question: Medical students? I can’t think of a poorer group of people. My medical student niece has a great T-shirt with “Massive Debt” on the front.)

The original loss of information came from United Healthcare, the health provider for UCI students, where over 1,000 identities were stolen. UHC was unaware of the breach. The spokesperson seemed to think it was local to UCI - and nothing further bad was happening….Guess it was not happening to HER.

“Local and federal law-enforcement agencies have been called in to help with the investigation, and they have traced the source of the data breach to United Healthcare, the carrier for the school’s graduate student health-insurance program.”

The way this was discovered was by the students attempting to file tax returns. And what about those tax “rebates?” Gotten yours? Maybe not…..