“When someone appearing to be your boss emails you and says they urgently need you to send them employees’ W-2 information from 2016, what do you do? Well, if you haven’t been trained properly or reminded often enough – or if your employer doesn’t have safeguards in place that might prevent you from just sending an email with an attachment out of the system – you might fall for the scam and email criminals the requested information.
If you don’t want to be hated by your colleagues whom you have put at risk of tax refund fraud and identity theft, when you get a request to email W-2 information, STOP and consult with a supervisor and ask them to confirm up the chain that this is a legitimate request.
Last year, this site compiled 145 such incidents before I somewhat waved a white flag in terms of trying to keep up. Let’s see how 2017 goes.”
Author: Dissent