quote:

The federal government’s stimulus checks were meant to help people exactly like Krystle Phelps of Owasso, Okla.

She and her husband, Christopher, who have two children, recently lost their incomes after Oklahoma shut down the bars near Tulsa that she cleaned and that he supplied with vending machines. But when Ms. Phelps, 33, went to the I.R.S. website to check on the status of her family’s stimulus funds, she learned someone else had filed taxes on her husband’s behalf and used his identity to obtain their $3,400 payment.

“I cried all day,” said Ms. Phelps, who is about a month away from being unable to pay her mortgage and has cut out everything but the basics, canceling cable and eliminating snacks for the kids. “It is a little relief, and then you find out it isn’t happening.”

With the government doling out trillions of dollars to blunt the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic, these are good times for thieves and dangerous times for those who actually need the money.

“I’ve been in this space for over 30 years and I have not seen anything like this in my entire career,” said Eva Velasquez, the chief executive of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit based in San Diego that helps victims. “The scope, the scale, the speed and the efficiency of the scams is breathtaking.”

...

Many people’s personal information is readily accessible to hackers, amassed from dozens of data breaches over the past few years. Last month, Experian, the credit reporting agency, found a fresh batch of stolen data for three million people, containing all the pieces of personal information that a scammer would need to file for their stimulus checks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/technology/stimulus-checks-hackers-coronavirus.html