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  1. Taxes
  2. IRS

A New IRS Tool Lets You Protect Your Tax Refund — and Your Identity — From Scammers

Published: Feb 19, 2021 4 min read
A mouse trap on top of a 1040 form
Money; Shutterstock

Filing your taxes is stressful enough. The last thing you want to worry about is someone else filing yours before you do.

But with the rise of data breaches and scammers getting more sophisticated by the day, it’s a risk we all need to consider. Reports of identity theft in 2020 hit 1.4 million, the FTC found, more than double the number of reports in 2019. Meanwhile, the IRS identified $2.3 billion in tax fraud schemes in fiscal year 2020.