Fraudsters stole £15m+ of government tax
by Nikola Strahija on December 17th, 2005 By making false claims in the name of job center workers, the fraudsters have made government over 15 million pounds poorer, HM Revenue & Customs estimates.
Although several computer experts warned beforehand, HM Revenue & Customs shut down its tax credit portal website at the start of December, only after uncovering an attempt to defraud the system using the identities of Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) staff.
In R&C they presume fraudsters had some inside help, which led to almost 13,000 job centre staff exposed to attack. Attackers have National Insurance numbers, names and dates of birth of thousands of job centre staff working in London, Glasgow, Lancashire and Pembrokeshire on their disposal.
That information was enough for crooks to make false tax credit claims, which were redirected to bogus addresses and accounts. Crooks took advantage of a lack of comprehensive checks of online applications, and the total damage is not known yet, because R&C is only at an early stage of investigating the scope of the fraud.
