FORT WORTH - A black and white photograph shows a young couple lovingly looking their premature daughter.
"That was one of my favorite memories of Charlotte," Angela Bassett said.
She and her husband, Justin, lost Charlotte in 2010 after just one week. They never dreamed anyone would try to profit from their pain.
That is, until the IRS rejected their taxes because someone else had already claimed Charlotte as a dependent.
"The nerve of people to steal a Social Security number from a child who passed away," Justin said.
They began all the calls to figure out what had happened.
"Here we are, still grieving and dealing with our loss, and someone is benefiting from our loss," Angela said. "So it was a really heart-breaking situation."
A year later, their friends Scott and Rebecca Stepter also lost their premature daughter, Lila.
The IRS also rejected their taxes because someone had already claimed Lila.
That's when the Bassetts got a call from Scott, a science teacher in FWISD.
"So he called and said, 'This is too ironic,'" Bassett recalled. "[He said,] 'This is happening to us as well. Maybe there's something going on here.'"
They'll likely never know how the Social Security information was stolen. But what more and more grieving parents are discovering is that when people die, their Social Security numbers become public government records.
Internet security experts say identity thieves scour those records constantly. The IRS said Charlotte and Lila are part of an explosion in false tax filings using identity theft.
Scott Stepter said when he called the IRS the woman he spoke with was even a victim of identity theft.
That did not ease the pain of reliving his daughter's death because of a tax cheat.
According to the IRS, something like this has happened to nearly a half-million taxpayers since 2008. Cases have tripled in the last two years.
.Culled from WFAA.COM
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