The CRA may have overtaken grandparents on Facebook as the prime target for fraud scams.
Driving the news: According to a CBC investigation, the personal Canada Revenue Agency accounts of about 62,000 Canadians were hacked from March 2020 to December 2023, breaches that weren’t shared publicly or reported to Parliament.
- During this tax season alone, bad actors reportedly used the info from hacked accounts to claim more than $6 million in fraudulent refunds.
Why it matters: The agency tasked with looking after the tax dollars of Canadians has had a hard time detecting fake tax claims, including from hundreds of its own employees.
- The CRA said it had mistakenly made more than $190 million in payments to accounts tied to "confirmed" cases of privacy breaches since 2020.
- While it officially reported only around 113 breaches in the last four years, the agency later admitted it has actually been hit with over 31,468 breaches from March 2020 to December of last year.
Bottom line: The CRA has had some success recouping funds from scams. As of late last year, the agency said it had gotten about $1.8 billion back from fake pandemic-era claims — still a fraction of the ~$15 billion in pandemic benefits sent to ineligible Canadians.—LA