"Kasper said the detective learned that money was deposited into her account, and that she sent the money out to locations in Nigeria via Western Union wire transfer, keeping some as a profit, and apparently never suspecting that she might be doing something illegal."

I am having a really tough time believing she never suspected she was doing something illegal.

I think the system used to claim your account is the one that had data stolen from it.

Our luck ... our data was stolen in the Anthem fiasco and used to submit fraudulent returns. No problem. The IRS contacted us to let us know and asked us to use the verification system to prove we were ourselves.

I cannot wait for the auto notification we were part of this data issue. lol

What I cannot understand about the issue is no one noticed a 50% failure rate in the process.

Currently, the link in the article that leads to irs.gov personal account creation, http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Get-Transcript , doesn't work for the stated purpose. And while a more direct link I found, https://sa.www4.irs.gov/eauth/pub/login.jsp , doesn't work either at the moment, perhaps at least one of the two will work sometime soon.

After Brian Krebs exposed this security loophole in March 2015, the IRS apparently did nothing. Why doesn't the IRS site allow users to create a secure account? For example, see the Social Security site at https://secure.ssa.gov/.

Yeah, I saw it then and got PDF's of all prior year taxes. Info needed was suprisingly little. I had way more trouble changing the first password I used than I did setting up my account in the first place.