The cases of identity theft in the US 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 US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which received about 1.4m reports of identity theft last year, according to a blog post published Mon., when the commission launched 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 & Business Education at the FTC.
Benefits Fraud
In 2020, there were 394,280 reports about US Govt. benefits fraud compared with 12,900 reports in 2019. Most of these involved people filing for unemployment benefits, which experienced a sharp rise in 2020 due to the pandemic, Gressin noted.
During 2020, the US Govt. expanded unemployment benefits to people left jobless by the pandemic, something cyber-criminals took as an opportunity to file unemployment claims using other people’s personal information, she observed.
Rapper
In 1 such high-profile case, Rapper Fontrell Antonio Baines. who goes by the stage name “Nuke Bizzle,” boasted about perpetrating exactly this crime in his music video “EDD”—a reference to the California Employment Development Department.
The video shows Nuke Bizzle & his cohorts collecting EDD envelopes from various mailboxes, filing fraudulent claims on a laptop & spending wads of cash. Bizzle was subsequently arrested & ordered to stand trial in a US District Court in Los Angeles.
Seasoned cyber-criminals also aimed to cash in on COVID-19-related unemployment claims, with more success than the ill-fated rapper.
The highly organized Nigerian cybergang Scattered Canary for instance made off with millions in business e-mail compromise (BEC)-related fraudulent claims made on the online unemployment websites of 8 US states, according to a report released in May.
COVID-19 Fraud
People aiming to receive funds from government-sponsored small-business loan programs also experienced a rise in identity-theft crimes, according to the FTC. 99,650 cases of fraud involving business or personal loans were reported, compared with 43,920 reports in 2019.
Small businesses were some of the organisations most dramatically affected by COVID-19 economic shutdowns in 2020, & many business owners filed for federal relief. While “not all of the new reports related to the govt.-relief effort,” Gressin acknowledged, “they were a big share of the increase.”
Stimulus Checks
Cyber-criminals also used identity theft to target stimulus checks that the US Govt. paid out to the taxpayers, boosting the number of tax-related cases of this type of cyber-crime, 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 cyber-criminals to steal 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” commented Gressin.
Taxpayer Data
Also, hacker forums saw an increase in buying & selling taxpayer data around the time the COVID-19 relief package was announced, alongside the usual phishing & other campaigns typically used to steal annual tax pay-outs, according to a report released in May.
The US FTC & its partners are co-hosting a series of free events this week around identity theft to help inform consumers. More info on the FTC’s website.
https://www.cybernewsgroup.co.uk/virtual-conference-march-2021/
